Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Cover credit: Close-up of pitch at the world's largest natural pitch lake,
Trinidad, 2007. Photo © Robert Harding.
FOR JE SSE AND SOPHIA
This page intentionally left blank
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
Conclusion 141
Notes 153
References 165
Index 183
This page intentionally left blank
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
x Acknowledgm e nts
INTRODUCTION
How does it feel to change the climate? This question seems more absurd
than impolite. It implies a chain of causation and responsibility that still
remains invisible and mostly unacknowledged. In fact, some people—a
billion high emitters—burn oil and otherwise pump carbon dioxide (co2)
into the atmosphere at a rate dangerous to societies and ecosystems every-
where (Chakravarty et al. 2010). A slice of this population—overrepre-
sented in the United States—disputes the science and scenarios of climate
change. But explicit denial is less widespread than silence and disregard.
The bulk of informed consumers simply don’t care a great deal about
carbon emissions and their consequences. Tobacco provokes stronger re-
actions, indeed sometimes a disgust verging on revulsion. Where is the
revulsion over flood, drought, and myriad other catastrophic shifts in the
conditions for life and society on planet Earth? Menacing as it increasingly
is, climate change has yet to become a moral issue for most people.
Energy without Conscience seeks to explain this persistent banality. I
am not trying to expose—as others have done—the greed of individuals,
firms, or governments. Capitalism and convenience certainly underwrite
the status quo. Yet m eans-to-ends reasoning does not account fully for
the abundance of support for fossil fuels. Cultural meanings also sustain
hydrocarbons. In the oil profession itself, people drill for noneconomic, as
well as economic, motives. “The romance [among oil geologists] was not
really based on money, which was only a way of keeping score,” reminisces
the Texan John Graves (1995, xi–xii) in an essay on prospecting. His nos-
talgia exceeds his greed. I am interested in such cultural dispositions and
discourses. As I argue, they obscure responsibility for carbon emissions
among those most responsible and those most susceptible—technicians
in and local bystanders to the fossil fuel business (who are often the same
people). Certain modes of thought inside and outside the industry push a
more critical consideration of oil to the margin. Hydrocarbons—as I refer
to oil, natural gas, coal, and bitumen—seem both invisible and inevitable.
One notices them only when something goes wrong—when, for instance,
massive volumes gush into the Gulf of Mexico. Water-borne pollution
of this sort triggers professional concern as well as public outrage. This
book, on the other hand, describes the everyday, intended functions of
our energy system. When platforms, pipelines, and pumps work properly,
oil arrives safely at the gas tank of a motor vehicle. Then, combusted in
the engine, the hydrocarbon spews carbon dioxide into the air unnoticed
and without protest. One might refer to this form of pollution as “the spill
everywhere.” It far outweighs local contamination, both in volume and in
planetary effects. Oil, in other words, is most dangerous when it behaves
ordinarily and when people treat it as ordinary—that is, as neither moral
nor immoral, but amoral.
Investigating such a nonevent—really the partial absence of mean-
ing—requires an indirect approach. One has to detect the meaning and
sentiment that prevent an accumulation of feeling around oil or carbon
emissions. Why do hydrocarbons not inspire disgust—or romance for that
matter—among more people more often? To answer this question, one
has to measure the subtle effort expended as informed people avoid reflect-
ing ethically or emotionally upon oil. The right circumstances will throw
this making of ordinariness into the sharpest relief. I found those condi-
tions at the birthplace of petroleum: Trinidad in the southern Caribbean
(map i.1). Here, Walter Darwent drilled the world’s first continually pro-
ductive oil well in 1866.1 This larger island of Trinidad and Tobago shares
deposits with nearby Venezuela. Until recently, it contributed the lion’s
share of gas imported to the United States. But it does not rank among
the traditional petrostates, either in production or in reputation. I lived
in Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad and Tobago, for the 2009–10 aca-
demic year and conducted ethnographic research among energy experts,
anti-industrial activists, and policy makers preparing for climate change. At
that point, Trinidad (as I abbreviate the nation-state) had never suffered a
major spill. In terms of environmental harm, the industry was primarily
committing climate change through co2 emissions. But Trinidadians—
whose per capita carbon emissions ranked fourth among nations—did
not appreciate this responsibility. My informants considered themselves
to be victims—and only victims—of rising seas. In these ways, groups of
2 I ntroduction
map i.1 Trinidad. Prepared by Mike Siegel of Rutgers Cartography Lab.
Trinis edged so close to the moral problem of hydrocarbons that they had
to avert their gaze. Looking historically at Trinidad’s energy systems, as I
do in part I, I found moments when energy both did and did not prick the
conscience. Plantation slavery—reliant upon embodied, somatic power—
never achieved stability. Bonded people constantly reminded masters and
governors of the bondsmen’s individuality, of their will for freedom. Con-
science dogged the energy that harvested sugar. Hydrocarbons arrived
with no such baggage. Petroleum raised no moral outrage or endorsement,
and contemporary beliefs, institutions, and forms of expertise helped to
keep it that way. (Coal, a notable absence, has never been produced in Trin-
idad.) That process of overlooking consequences continues today. Energy
without Conscience illuminates the people close to and conducting this
I ntroduction 3
work—subjects both intimate with and untroubled by the carbon bomb
ticking around them.
I did not approach these women and men dispassionately, and I have
not written about them with the usual ethnographic sympathy. Frankly, I
oppose their interests. Partiality is not new to my field: anthropologists
often take sides, engaging with popular movements and local projects
(Goldstein 2012, 35ff.). Nancy Scheper-Hughes advocates a “militant an-
thropology,” eschewing “false neutrality . . . in the face of the broad polit-
ical dramas of life and death, good and evil” (1995, 411). In solidarity, she
joined desperately poor mothers of a Brazilian shantytown as a compan-
heira. Stop merely spectating, she demands of anthropologists. Practice
instead an “ethic of care and responsibility” toward your informants (419).
I have answered that call only halfway. From the beginning, I encountered
oil as immoral—and as an industry that should go extinct. I hope for a
rapid and complete conversion to wind and solar power, a change both
necessary and, experts increasingly suggest, feasible as well ( Jacobson and
Delucchi 2009). We may still need oil for plastics and for some kinds of
high-reliability energy uses, in hospitals, for example. Undeniably, how-
ever, I wish an end to the current livelihoods of most of the people—even
of my friends—described in this book. Therefore, I do not express care
toward petroleum geologists. I write about them with understanding and
with ethnographic nuance, but I shall not present myself as a companheiro
in relation to this social group. Besides, my subjects never asked for care,
comradeship, or solidarity. Wealthy and powerful, they need no help from
scholars. Hence, a militant anthropology of elites can afford a certain ten-
sion, emphasizing responsibility more than care. There is a difference be-
tween these two attitudes. The responsible writer looks over an informant’s
shoulder, prepared to reveal and criticize the wider harm that person may
cause. Perhaps this is where the social science of climate change needs to
go: resisting fossil fuels by documenting how their promoters think, act,
and feel. Complicity, in a word, is the chief concern of this book.
I arrived in Trinidad expecting abundant art and literature about oil and
gas. Those two commodities, after all, drove the leading industry in this
acknowledged petrostate. I thought I knew how to trace the links between
4 I ntroduction
energy systems and cultural expression. At that very moment, I was in
the process of publishing my second book on Zimbabwe (Hughes 2010).
The ethnography concerned white Zimbabweans, including their repre-
sentations of Lake Kariba. Once the largest reservoir in the world, Lake
Kariba spawned a literary and artistic soul-searching among the colonial
population, as it grappled with the contradictions of artificial nature. A
white population of 100,000 produced more than thirty books—as well
as countless films and works of art—about this single landscape feature.
Arriving in Trinidad, then, I expected images and texts on oil everywhere.
Surely, a nation of 1.3 million would represent its landscape of rigs, sea-
scape of offshore platforms, and ubiquitous burning of oil and gas in cars
and factories. Initially I found nothing. Art and music—which abound
in Port of Spain—often depicted nature, more often showed the human
body, and focused in particular on the annual Carnival celebration. I found
mere mentions of oil and gas in a handful of calypsos. Scrunter’s ballad
“Oil in the Coil” (1985) associates petroleum with virility and, indeed, with
an aphrodisiac quality of men from the petroleum region.2 More chastely,
Earl Lovelace, Trinidad’s national writer, penned one line in a play: “With
gladness beating in your heart, like them Texaco machines pumping oil out
of the earth chest” (1984, 3). I followed up this metaphor of petroleum and
vitality, but the trail ended there. I met many musicians, writers, and artists
who all agreed on this petro-silence. Some mentioned Trinidad’s national
instrument: in the 1930s, oil workers fashioned barrels into the steel pan.
Again, though, the beneficiaries of this upcycling focused on the container
more than on the contents (Campbell 2014, 53). Oil itself fertilized a garden
of symbols where almost nothing grew.
This strange sterility has more to do with oil than with Trinidad. Across
the world, a century and a half of petroleum production and consumption
have imprinted the arts and literature relatively little. In absolute terms, of
course, there are many films and texts about oil. Analysts of the humanities
mostly prefer to see this glass as half full. Hannah Appel, Arthur Mason,
and Michael Watts refer to a “rich loam” for literature. However, they privi-
lege moments “where the normal and calculated course of energy events is
interrupted” (Appel, Mason, and Watts 2015a, 10, 14). Introducing another
important collection, Ross Barrett and Daniel Worden forgo their own
nuanced understanding of “oil’s signature cultural ubiquity and absence.”
They turn quickly to “spectacle” as a central theory (Barrett and Worden
I ntroduction 5
2014, xvii, xxiv). Other observers—with whom I agree more—find hydro-
carbons to be blatantly missing in action. It is “startling,” writes critic Rob
Nixon, “that not since [Upton] Sinclair’s California saga Oil! [1926] . . . has
any author hazarded writing the great American oil novel” (Nixon 2011,
73). Nixon cites a “dramatic deficit”: oil appears less frequently in culture
than one would expect given its economic importance. The Indian novelist
Amitav Ghosh diagnoses a dearth of “petro-fiction” and “the muteness of
the Oil Encounter,” as he terms the social shifts accompanying petroleum
(Ghosh 1992, 30). Likewise, Gustavo Luis Carrera begins La Novela del
Petróleo en Venezuela somewhat deflatingly with, “This book relates to a
novel that does not exist. And in that there is no exaggeration. One does
not find in Venezuela a fiction of petroleum as, for example there is, in
the Hispano-American context, a fiction of the Mexican revolution.”3 A
petrostate, Carrera argues, scares writers into self-censorship. Ghosh might
agree, but he diagnoses another lacuna in the social relations of oil pro-
duction. The oil town—in the Persian Gulf or elsewhere—draws workers
from myriad countries. The resulting amalgam congeals too little to form
a community that might be narrated. As a final explanation for the scarcity
of oil novels, Peter Hitchcock advances omnipresence itself. “Oil’s satura-
tion of the infrastructure of modernity,” he argues, “[obstructs] its cultural
representation” (Hitchcock 2010, 81). Oil flows like the unremarked air that
industry and consumer classes breathe every moment (Huber 2013, 26).
Here is a theory of absence rather than ubiquity: state power, social chaos,
and sheer familiarity all suppress oil fiction.
To these three explanations I would add a fourth, more technical con-
sideration. Petroleum inhabits geological rather than human or medical
spaces. Some bitumen, the heaviest hydrocarbon, has seeped into public
sight at Los Angeles’s La Brea tar pits (LeMenager 2012). Much more oil
circulates through middle-class life encased in plastics and vehicles. But
the raw, undisguised substance almost invariably passes unseen from sub-
terranean strata to enclosed pipes and tanks. One can easily confuse the
contents and the container. The photographer Edward Burtynsky, for in-
stance, titles his 2009 collection Oil, although the images show very little
oil (Burtynsky 2009; Szeman and Whiteman 2012). Except for views of
the tar sands in Alberta, the photos frame derivatives: pumps, pipes, re-
fineries, roads, cars, tires, planes, and ships. Crude itself does not appear.
A consumer injects gasoline blindly, without even glimpsing the liquid.
6 I ntroduction
i.1
Sebastião Salgado, “Greater Burhan Oil Field, Kuwait,” 1991. © Sebastião
Salgado. From Contact Press Images.
Only the abnormal event—the spill—brings a black goo into view and
into contact with human flesh, usually the worker’s flesh. The most famous
photographs of oil itself—taken by Sebastião Salgado (1993, 338–43) in
his Workers collection—show men plugging wells and fighting fires set by
Saddam Hussein’s government upon leaving Kuwait (figure i.1). Oil coats
their clothes and their bodies.4 Still, it doesn’t become part of them; petro-
leum washes off.
Coal, on the other hand, operates surgically on the human body. The
greatest novel of coal—Emile Zola’s ([1885] 1968) Germinal—refers con-
tinually to the physiology of the French miner. The old man Bonnemort
“spit black,” explaining, “It’s coal. . . . I have enough of it in the carcass to
warm myself until the end of my days.”5 He and his coworkers refer proudly
to the cuts on their backs—made by low roofs in tunnels—as “grafts.”6
Finally, as a sabotaged mine collapses upon the workers, Zola describes it
as “an evil animal . . . that had swallowed so much human flesh!”7 People
enter the earth and the earth reciprocates by giving them silicosis. Diesel
fumes can also trigger childhood asthma, but many other contaminants
cause that pathology. Black lung is coal’s signature. That hydrocarbon, in
I ntroduction 7
other words, conducts a “social life,” made possible by the “intercalibration
of the biographies of persons and things” (Appadurai 1986, 22). Oil lives
alone in a studio apartment.
This contrast between the world’s two major fossil fuels runs right
down the middle of Upton Sinclair’s oeuvre. The famous American anti-
industrial muckraker penned King Coal: A Novel in 1917 and Oil! in 1926.
Both stories proceed in the manner of a bildungsroman: the young, naive,
male protagonist gains knowledge and maturity, specifically discovering
and then attempting to ameliorate the lot of the working class. A trio of
characters surrounds this hero: his father, a captain of the given industry; a
lovely, flighty girlfriend belonging to the same upper class; and a decidedly
poorer female with a heart of gold. The hero jilts the princess for a life of
activism with the proletarian woman. So closely aligned in cast and plot,
the novels differ mostly in their descriptions of the commodity and the
labor it entails. Sinclair’s petroleum novel introduces readers to the oil field
by narrating a gusher: “The inside of the earth seemed to burst out through
that hole: a roaring and rushing, as Niagara [Falls], and a black column
shot up into the air . . . and came thundering down to earth as a mass of
thick, black, slimy slippery fluid . . . so that men had to run for their lives”
(Sinclair 1926, 25). In King Coal, the equivalent passage—positioned al-
most exactly at the same point in the novel—describes a more prosaic, but
deeper engagement with geology: “The vein varied from four to five feet
in thickness; a cruelty of nature which made it necessary that the men . . .
should learn to shorten their stature. . . . They walked with head and shoul-
ders bent over and arms hanging down, so that, seeing them coming out of
the shaft in the gloaming, one thought of a file of baboons” (Sinclair 1917,
22). Oil provokes flight while coal calls the very species into question. Later
in the same passage on mining, Sinclair refers to the colliers as “a separate
race of creatures, subterranean gnomes” (1917, 22). Men adapted to the
shafts and tunnels. Writing slightly earlier—and in the wake of Charles
Darwin—H. G. Wells imagined colliers evolving into a separate popula-
tion. In The Time Machine (Wells 1895), Morlocks—a pun on “mullocks,”
a contemporary term for miners (Stover 1996, 9)—hunt down the insipid
descendants of the rich. In other words, this habitat—which one historian
denotes the “mine workscape”—exerts powerful, mostly negative effects
on Homo sapiens (Andrews 2008, 123–25). Where coal acts continually and
viscerally, oil only bursts forth in rare frenzies.
8 I ntroduction
There is one exception, however. In Nigeria, oil has provoked a moral
response in literature and more widely as well. Into the delta of the Niger
River, petroleum has spewed and spilled prolifically for the last half cen-
tury. Nine to thirteen million barrels enter marshes and mangrove swamps
every year—an annual spill equivalent to the 1987 Exxon Valdez disaster
(Baird 2010). There, hydrocarbons break into view, as the sheen on water
and as flames flicking from a ruptured pipeline. A photographer like Ed
Kashi can capture women baking tapioca by the heat of horrifically toxic
gas flares (figure i.2; Kashi and Watts 2008, 20–23). The dystopia deepens:
delta residents attack oil installations, sabotage pipelines, steal oil, and resell
it in an extensive network of traders, insurgents, and extortionists (Gelber
2015; Timsar 2015). Oil, in short, busts out of its containers, triggering what
geographer Michael Watts (2001) terms “petro-violence,” intense struggles
over the myth and reality of unearned wealth. Nigerian writers—mostly
unknown outside their country—have fashioned these conditions into a
genre of “petro-magic realism,” laced with themes of indigenous animism,
“monstrous-but-mundane violence,” and oil pollution (Wenzel 2006, 456).
Wealth erupts in spectacle (Apter 2005). At the same time, a palpable “oil
doom” prevails in representations of that region (LeMenager 2014, 135). In
short, this oil does not behave in anything approaching the conventional
fashion. In Nigeria, the economy and infrastructure of oil malfunctions and
even collapses. Meanwhile, crude generates all the morally rich meanings
so absent in other oil regions. Nigeria is the exception—the anomalous
element—that proves the rule of oil’s overwhelmingly banal, amoral in-
terpretation.
Elsewhere, hydrocarbons slip into popular discourse almost as unre-
marked as a cliché. The phrase “black gold,” for instance, exerts little critical
leverage anymore, if it ever did. That metaphor for money runs through
the brief canon of fiction and critical nonfiction on oil in the second half
of the twentieth century.8 Iran’s petroleum, writes the journalist Ryszard
Kapuściński, “squirts obligingly into the air and falls back to earth as a rus-
tling shower of money” (1986, 347). In Edna Ferber’s Giant—the only U.S.
novel to rival Oil!—Texas crude simultaneously enriches and debases the
cowhand Jett Rink. He is “touched by the magic wand of the good fairy,
Oil” (Ferber 1952, 412). With similar irony, Abdelrahman Munif ’s Cities of
Salt (1994) focuses on the overwhelming aesthetic of unearned wealth.
The American oil company throws a party on the beach that stuns the
I ntroduction 9
i.2
Ed Kashi, woman baking tapioca by gas flare, Nigeria, 2008. Courtesy of Ed
Kashi via VII Photo Agency.
locals: “Sorrow, desires, fears, and phantoms reigned that night. Every
man’s head was a hurricane of images, for each knew that a new era had
begun” (Munif 1994, 221). Finally, in Venezuela, petroleum symbolizes “un-
controllable powers . . . seen primarily as a form of money” (Coronil 1997,
353). Beyond the orbit of these well-known literary and academic texts,
financial meanings operate as dead metaphors. Dead metaphors—which
might be thought of as merely sleeping—do connect ideas but not in a
way that provokes outrage (Kövecses 2002, ix). Oil stimulates the stunted
emotion Stephanie LeMenager calls “petromelancholia.” Authors of this
genre express “the feeling of losing cheap energy” (LeMenager 2014, 102).
What about the feeling of, by contrast, using lots of energy of the most
ecologically expensive sort? Recall the unprecedented clarity and power
of Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, released in 2006. “The moral im-
perative to make big changes is inescapable,” he intones at the beginning.
Then, having elevated himself to the top of the hockey-puck curve of co2
concentrations, he concludes, “If we allow that to happen, it is deeply un-
ethical” (Gore 2006, emphasis in original). Gore then spoke of obligation
and a need for restraint. His film reached millions of Americans, but it was
not enough to attach conscience lastingly to oil.
10 I ntroduction
Paths Not Taken
I ntroduction 11
cultural productivity. His figures omitted sunlight entirely while enumer-
ating slaves in great detail. How many bondsmen were needed per unit of
land, Chacón constantly asked, while seeking to import this labor from
elsewhere in the Caribbean. He recruited settlers—largely French planters
disaffected with the governance of their islands—as a means to acquiring
their human property. What he could not obtain regionally, he tried in vain
to import directly from the African coast. Chacón did not employ the term
energy. Yet plantation slavery and the Middle Passage propagated a new
understanding of that category: no longer as a diffuse life force and not
even as human labor but now as an expendable, consumable fuel. “Arms,”
as the men and women were called, crossed the ocean in the hold of ships.
Buyers and sellers measured them in units, stored, used, and—as they died
from overwork in Trinidad—replaced them. Their agriculture depended
on the sun, of course, but planters devoted little attention to it. In this shift
of values, energy lost both its anchor to certain tropical landscapes and
its divine quality. Chacón, having never read Gumilla, did not appreciate
his own turn from the sacred. He did, however, wrestle with the practical
and moral difficulties of objectifying women and men. At times—as when
slaves fled from their plantations—he had to acknowledge the free will
and all-too-human qualities of “arms.” Chacón, then, did not quite achieve
what he, gropingly, set out to do: to establish a pipeline of interchange-
able, impersonal energy units. Chapter 1 considers Chacón’s successes and
his ethical challenges, scruples that, of course, culminated eventually in
Emancipation.
After Chacón and after Emancipation, another European converted
hydrocarbons into an energy form truly without conscience. Trinidad
contains the most prolific seep of petroleum in the world. Heavy asphalt
literally bubbles to the surface. Indigenous people and Spaniards had
used the black goo for caulking ships and similar tasks. Could one burn
this substance? By the early 1860s, Conrad Stollmeyer—a German im-
migrant to Trinidad—had distilled the material into kerosene and was
selling it as an illuminant. In 1866, Walter Darwent drilled the world’s first
productive oil well in the south of the island. But Stollmeyer—unlike any
other figure in this drama—knew indirectly of Gumilla and his ideas of
solar energy. Indeed, the German had proposed and planned a utopian
colony to be powered by sun, wind, and other tropical forces. God-given
powers, he hoped, would replace not only plantation arms but all forms of
12 I ntroduction
hard, manual labor. This utopia failed immediately and abjectly. Then the
German discovered combustible petroleum. In this interval, Stollmeyer
juggled all the major energy options—solar, wind, somatic, and petrolic—
in his eager hands. He had an ethical choice to make, but—by that point
disillusioned with utopianism—he appreciated only its business aspects.
Through actions more than words, he married oil with human labor in a
fashion that emancipated no one. As chapter 2 narrates, Stollmeyer’s loss
of conscience helped craft an energy without conscience. Retrospective
observers refer to this sort of conjuncture as an “energy transition,” a slow
but definitive flip from one source to another (Smil 2010, vii–viii). Read-
ing history forward and in its context, however, one cannot pinpoint a flip
in Trinidad. Stollmeyer and his contemporaries hesitated as they sorted
through immeasurable opportunities and risks.
I want to reconsider that moment of doubt from an ethical perspective.
The Caribbean had already witnessed reprehensible acts of breathtaking
proportions (Khan 2001). Europeans had virtually wiped out the islands’
indigenous people, only to replace them with enslaved Africans and in-
dentured Asians. Capitalism, racism, and Christianity all contributed to
extraordinary violence. But—alongside and partly independent of these
forces—a new idea of fuel took hold. In Trinidad, producers and consum-
ers of energy came to see it as a transportable, interchangeable commod-
ity. This ideological and moral shift has never figured among the famous
transformations of the Caribbean—or of anywhere really. Trinidad’s histo-
riography tends to treat oil and gas merely as substances and as unalloyed
goods for the island and beyond (Mulchansingh 1971; Ministry of Energy
and Energy Industries 2009). In both world wars, Trinidad’s oil propelled
British and Allied forces. After Independence in 1962, the country devel-
oped its gas sector, becoming a major exporter of downstream products
such as methanol and plastics. Oil has given the country economic stability
and political sovereignty. Thus, thanks to relatively open governance and
technical competence, Trinidad has largely skirted oil’s frequent “resource
curse.” The specters of underdevelopment, corruption, violence, and
pollution do haunt the island. But the Orinoco delta is no Niger delta of
oil theft and paramilitary politics. Trinidad’s hydrocarbons appear to have
solved many problems without creating substantial new ones. Energy with-
out Conscience seeks to overturn that comforting account. Trinidad—like
any state producing or consuming hydrocarbons—must reckon with the
I ntroduction 13
contemporary great evil of dumping carbon dioxide in the skies. True, the
effects of burning oil have taken longer to accrue than did the earlier body
counts of Atlantic conquest or capture. But damage now becomes more
evident each year. The historical part of this book (part I) returns to the
1780s and 1850s, when solar, human, and fossil energy sources seemed si-
multaneously promising and problematic. Revisiting the paths not taken,
we might discern a better choice.
Complicity
I have struggled to find a language with which to describe the varied con-
ditions of my informants in Trinidad. Like many of us, they burn hydrocar-
bons at rates higher than the global per capita average. The women and men
of this first group of Trinis drive cars, live in air-conditioned houses, and
use energy in all the ways characteristic of the world’s billion high emitters.
Many of my informants go further than that: they control private firms and
government agencies that exploit hydrocarbons systematically. This second
group comprises “captains of industry”—in the quaint phrase used without
irony in Trinidad’s convention halls and luxury hotels. A third set of infor-
mants captains nothing, not even motor vehicles. The residents of South
Trinidad’s oil belt consume little oil. They become relevant to this story
because of their choice not to protest the oil and gas industry. The practices
I describe then range from promoting oil, to reaping its benefits, to remain-
ing silent about its costs. Environmentalists might describe the first party
as responsible for climate change and the last one as ignorant of it. Perhaps
the consumers in the middle—for whom we still lack an adequate descrip-
tor—act negligently toward the atmosphere and everything dependent on
it. If climate change were solely an environmental problem, then this lexi-
con would do the job: I would present the ethnography of people variously
enabling one form of pollution. But I don’t consider climate change to be
merely an environmental problem. It is that and much, much more. The
commodity chain from hydrocarbons to hurricanes—which I treat as one
unit—has occupied the land like a far-reaching system of power. Combus-
tion, as Rob Nixon (2011) writes, wreaks a “slow violence” as devastating
as it is pervasive. Occasionally, a fast Pakistani flood or Louisiana hurricane
causes death tolls too high to measure with accuracy. Some authors describe
14 I ntroduction
this uneven lethality as “petro-dictatorship” or “fossil capitalism.” Climate
change thus exceeds other ecological crises in both its scale and its delivery
of force. I am less concerned with labeling this system than with under-
standing those operating within it. They are, I argue, “complicit” with oil.
In this sense of widespread but traceable, anthropogenic harm, colonial-
ism may provide the best analogue.10 Almost as total as climate change, the
system of rule prevailing over the Americas, Africa, Oceania, and much of
Asia for as many as five centuries contained fast and slow violence. Around
1800, outright enslavement and genocide gave way to Christian and other
“civilizing missions.” European scientists began an “anticonquest” of dis-
covery and description. The geographer and explorer Alexander von
Humboldt contributed more than anyone to this movement. His and
contemporary texts, though, could not avoid complicity. So writes Mary
Louise Pratt, charging various narrators with constructing “cultureless”
brown and black bodies available for European domination (Pratt 1992,
53). Pratt may have indicted von Humboldt unfairly (Marcone 2013), but
she indicates the difficulty any intellectual faces in thinking outside the
dominant ideology of his or her time. In the twentieth century, though,
the colonial paradigm began to crack. In 1937, George Orwell denounced
both imperial working conditions and left-wing intellectuals’ tolerance of
the same: “In order that England may live in comparative comfort, a hun-
dred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation—an evil state of
affairs, but you acquiesce in it every time you step into a taxi or eat a plate
of strawberries and cream” (1937, 159). This charge—holding a large but
defined group responsible for vast harm—could just as well apply to users
of fossil fuels today. One can no longer plead ignorance. The information
that, say, carbon emissions are pushing millions of Indians into starvation
and displacement is widely available and credible. To choose the car over
the bicycle, one has to repudiate science. Few people reject climatology ex-
plicitly. Far more high emitters deliberately discount or refuse altogether to
imagine current and future victims of climate change. That decision takes
place almost, perhaps entirely, automatically, but it constitutes a discrete
action: “acquiescence,” in Orwell’s turn of phrase. Small, prosaic actions are
beginning to accrete to the level of mass death.
At that larger scale, with whom does the accomplice conspire? Com-
plicity, which shares a root with accomplice, implies a partner in crime.
I ntroduction 15
Perhaps oil serves as the trigger man. Bruno Latour (2005) might put the
argument in these terms: networks of human and petrolic “actants” collab-
orate on the basis of complementary properties. The harried commuter,
in other words, wants to reach her destination, the motor vehicle carries
her, and the petrol pushes the piston. More recent scholarship focuses on
the vibrant quality of materials, as if gasoline willed people from suburb
to suburb and jet fuel flew them personally from continent to continent.
Certainly, energy behaves in ways that suggest volition (Bennett 2010,
54). It moves at the speed of electrons or explodes into a toll-destroying
mushroom clouds. Many of my informants in Trinidad credited oil and gas
with an understated animacy. Deposits were constantly welling up, and, as
chapter 3 explains, petroleum experts portrayed themselves as hardly more
than helpmates to the nearest gusher. Such modesty actually shifts respon-
sibility to the hydrocarbons themselves, as if humans only lately joined a
geological plot hatched elsewhere. Ethnographically, I treat such theories
as a folk belief—or folk science—that obscures political and economic
relations. On the ground, people populate the network that wills carbon
emissions—and, therefore, climate change—to happen. Producers collab-
orate with consumers to move oil from underground reservoir to refinery,
to engine, to atmosphere. Almost all the time, that process unfolds exactly
as the sentient actors intended, anticipated, or could have anticipated it
to do. Hydrocarbons are an instrument, like the hammer that one uses to
pound a nail into a piece of wood. Until something goes wrong: oil does—
let’s say—conspire against people when its volatility causes a refinery to
explode and contaminate the local environment. The co2 spill everywhere,
on the other hand, figures only as the last link in a well-functioning com-
modity chain designed and operated entirely by men and women. At oppo-
site ends of a long pipe, consumers act as the party complicit to producers
of oil, and vice versa.
That multiplex human partnership encompasses only some people,
some societies, and some states. The bulk of our species—minus the one
billion high emitters—participates in oil mostly as victims of it. I do not
share the mounting concern that humanity has become a geological agent,
ushering us into the so-called Anthropocene era. The chemist Paul Crut-
zen popularized that neologism in 2002 to indicate “mankind’s growing in-
fluence on the environment.”11 By now, a wide range of scholars, journalists,
and activists defines the Anthropocene as “the first geological era shaped
16 I ntroduction
by one species, humans.” That charge assumes an onset of the Anthropo-
cene from the domestication of plants or from the Pleistocene extinctions
caused by the first Native Americans, as if maize cobs led inevitably to
megatrucks (Ruddiman 2013). A minority of Homo sapiens—“industrial
humans” perhaps—developed hydrocarbons and everything they power.
Today a minority dumps gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere (Malm
and Hornborg 2014). True, almost everyone buys plastic and other prod-
ucts containing oil and transported by burning oil. Yet the Zimbabwean
peasant who lights her mud-and-pole dwelling with one petroleum-based
candle hardly counts. She practices what Anna Tsing (2012, 95) calls “slow
disturbance,” artisanal lifeways that mostly recraft biodiversity. The prefix
anthro spreads blame too widely (Chakrabarty 2009, 216). A small guild, so
to speak, manufactures lethal climates for mass distribution.
In focusing on that guild, I have written a customary sort of ethnog-
raphy. Part II of Energy without Conscience examines the current life of
tribe-sized, faraway social groups so as to illuminate problems in North
America and Europe. The bulk of my readers, I suspect, live—as I do—in
the Global North and consume hydrocarbons at a fast clip. My informants
live in Trinidad and Tobago and engage with hydrocarbons in additional
ways. But the cultural distance is not so great that I need to familiarize you
long-windedly with my subjects. The particular hurdle for this book lies in
describing some of my informants as unusual at all. Crude oil, as the term
even suggests, is ordinary, pedestrian. To disrupt that normalcy, the activist
Bill McKibben labels oil, gas, and coal firms as “radicals. They are willing to
alter the chemical composition of the atmosphere in order to get money.
That’s as radical an act as any person who ever lived has undertaken” (Cli-
mate One 2011). Trinidad and Tobago’s energy experts find petroleum and
gas where no one else does, and some of them export their knowledge to
Africa and elsewhere.
Despite this trail of damage, I do not consider such people monsters,
motivated by hate or beyond the arc of reason. My informants practice
their professions in a fashion that both benefits society in the short term
and uses a natural resource that would otherwise be neglected. They
contribute only complicitly to a project larger than themselves. To that
project, additional clusters of Trinidadians contribute less directly. Chap-
ter 4 concerns environmentally minded activists, some of them poor and
undoubtedly low emitters. These men and women became complicit by
I ntroduction 17
omission: they refused to protest the global oil spill, as well as local ones,
and in so doing crafted a narrow, indeed obsolete, politics of pollution.
Finally, chapter 5 discusses what I call the climate intelligentsia of Trinidad,
a loose group of scientists, activists, and policy makers who portrayed Trin-
idad as an innocent victim of climate change. Astonishingly, their rhetoric
of small, vulnerable islands exonerated the country’s oil and gas sector.
These individuals all held erroneous assumptions, a fact that most—and
mostly with humor—acknowledged to me. Some are now trying to move
Trinidad’s own energy grid from gas to renewables. Most, though, want
simply to produce another barrel of oil.
How does it feel to change the climate in sensory, rather than moral, terms?
Feeling connotes tactile experiences as well as ethical dilemmas. The for-
mer do not immediately lead to the latter. To take things in proper order
then—as an ethnographic subject lives her life—let me ask, “How does
it feel, in sensations, to consume energy?” Matthew Huber has already
probed this issue in relation to U.S. suburbs. They present “an appearance
of atomized command over the spaces of mobility, home, and even the
body itself ” (Huber 2013, 23). People feel free, as they flit in cars between
detached houses and points of consumption. Residents of Port of Spain,
or at least of its wealthier parts, also know this behavior and its sense of
liberation. Many wake in the middle-and upper-class fringes of the city
and travel into or through the urban core daily by car. I followed this pat-
tern, sometimes alone and more often sharing transportation. The daily
journey covered what one might call three energy zones related to different
objects: automobiles, bodies, and buildings. Port of Spain is what Carola
Hein (2009) calls an “oil capital.” But it also seems to pulse with something
more elemental—a kind of mania and revelry in the consumption of en-
ergy per se. Cars, exercising men and women, and air-conditioned edifices
huffed and puffed visibly, even promiscuously.
The first sensation comes with combustion, the thrum of engines, and
the pull of g-forces. With my family, I lived in Cascade, on the fringe of
Port of Spain. We rented the house of Eden Shand, a retired politician de-
scribed at length in chapter 5. As the name suggests, Cascade slides down
the foothills of Northern Range, off dramatic ridges and into steep ravines.
18 I ntroduction
i.3 Port of Spain viewed from St. Ann’s. Photograph by the author.
I ntroduction 19
At its southern apron, Cascade and St. Ann’s spill into what I would call
a zone of body energy. The Queen’s Park Savannah, the greensward in the
middle of figure i.3, separates downtown from the northern outskirts. On
that very grass in 2007, Eden Shand deployed his body against the car, pro-
testing the paving of a southern section of the Savannah. A truck dumped
gravel on him, damaging his spine permanently. Around the Savannah
runs a 4-kilometer sidewalk, which is Trinidad’s closest approximation
to a pedestrian mall. People don’t merely idle and stroll. Fit women and
men come to see and be seen as they expend energy. Most go clockwise,
with the car traffic, and no one crosses the Savannah. Running shoes on, I
sometimes took part in this crowded rush hour of muscle and movement.
It peaks in January, as people methodically tone their bodies for Carnival.
They are enacting a cosmology—with a more positive outcome than in
Shand’s case. In Trinidad, writes anthropologist Daniel Miller, “the truth of
a person exists in this labour they perform to create themselves” (2011, 50).
Those exertions bear fruit as near-naked bodies cross through the south
stands—along the same Savannah edge—to be judged on Carnival Tues-
day. I “played mas,” as they say, dressed as a bare-chested pirate. With my
wife and two friends, we “chipped” down the road from sunup to sundown
for two days. I believe there is no outdoor recreational event where so many
people work so hard under such equatorial heat for so long. Rio’s Carnival
takes place mostly at night. The Boston Marathon finishes in a few hours.
In Port of Spain, masqueraders sweat like slaves, practicing an art form
derived from slavery. But even as they expend somatic power, they do not
feel anything like slaves. At the edge of the Savannah, where a parking sign
instructs, “four taxis facing north,” I ran into the author of a short story by
that name (Walcott-Hackshaw 2007). She was dancing with herself, with
her body, blissed out and oblivious to the world.
That taxi rank marks the boundary of Port of Spain’s third energy zone.
Elites have built an archipelago of air-conditioning. From the point where
I saw the writer in rapture, one crosses Queens Park West Road into the
neighborhood of Newtown. Once a frontier of urban expansion, these
dense blocks contain headquarters of foreign-owned oil companies: bp,
Repsol, eog, and British Gas. I did not go into these edifices very often. My
research centered on Trinidadian firms and organizations. But I wandered
those streets, sometimes meeting informants in the Rituals Café on Marli
Street. Even outside one feels the energy of cooling. Frigid air pours out,
20 I ntroduction
unimpeded by double doors or any of the other energy-saving methods
employed elsewhere. Businesspeople emerge from buildings overdressed,
scurrying from the tropical heat into climate-controlled cars. The Guy-
anese novelist Oonya Kempadoo (2001, 17) describes a look of “air con-
dition skin,” conveying wealth and the habit of self-protection from the
elements. Perhaps a whole neighborhood can wear this aesthetic. Trinis
themselves remark more frequently on the air-conditioning of another lo-
cale, about a mile south of Newtown. On the Gulf of Paria, the government
had recently established an International Waterfront Centre. Its Hyatt Ho-
tel and two glass spires—in the right background of figure i.3—deliber-
ately evoked Dubai. The Ministry of Energy and Energy Industries occu-
pied some office space, but most of the square footage stood empty. Trinis
joked about governmental hubris and speculated on air-conditioning. Dry
season temperatures exceeded 90˚F every day for months. Was the state
burning its natural gas reserves to cool vacant acres? Or was it letting them
bake, and risking equally expensive damage to the buildings? Workers at
the ministry understood more than the average person about heat and
energy. One usually burns fuel to raise temperatures. There is something
miraculous—always seemingly futuristic—about combustion for cooling.
It involves more artifice and people know it. Certainly, energy executives—
with their “air condition skin”—knew it as they hurried from one vessel of
privilege to another.
I conducted most of my ethnography along this energy-intensive tran-
sect of motors, muscles, and manipulated air. In Cascade, I lived near
some of my informants, but not with the close immediacy of the classic
peasant or tribal study. “Studying up”—as we call the ethnography of
elites—requires surmounting barriers against access (Nader 1974). Pe-
troleum geologists live behind walls, in gated communities. I had to meet
them over lunch, over drinks, or in their offices. Conferences allowed me
to carry out true participant observation. There—often in the resplendent
Hyatt Hotel—I joined discussions and receptions with the most accom-
plished and powerful energy experts. To be objects of anthropological
study alternately flattered and amused them. As I pushed this indulgence,
attitude became my method. Promoters of oil and gas are wrecking the
world. This conviction—my feeling about energy—has driven this study
from the beginning. Initially coy, I gradually deployed this sentiment. If
you really care about sea level rise, I would say over rum, why don’t you
I ntroduction 21
just leave the hydrocarbons in the ground? It was a provocation reminis-
cent of the filmmaker Michael Moore (2004)—who, in one memorable
scene, asks congressmen to enlist their children for military service in
Iraq.12 Moore did not amuse his interlocutors. Perhaps because Trinidad
has a tradition of teasing—called picong—energy experts took my jibes in
stride. They laughed and then responded revealingly. Still, I wanted more.
I wanted to find someone who agreed with me. So I left my customary
corridor in Port of Spain and explored the oil fields and industrial sites of
South Trinidad. I found people opposed to pollution in their communities,
and asked, “Would you really be satisfied if this industry left here merely
to export harm elsewhere, possibly to the whole planet?” Most would have
been. Again, I learned a great deal while gaining little peace. I found data
but not truth as moral clarity.
At least, I found complex individuals: the planner-cum-slaver Josef
Chacón, the utopian-turned-oilman Conrad Stollmeyer, the eco-driller
Krishna Persad, the selective environmentalist Wayne Kublalsingh, and the
lady-doth-protest-too-much prime minister Patrick Manning. Throughout
the book, I attend to the consciousness of key figures in the energy trade.
Many of these men—men have consistently dominated the energy sec-
tor—failed in their own terms. They imagined more than they invented.
Conditions frustrated their ambitions, or they themselves sold out their
loftiest ideals. Why should any living or long-dead leader with few follow-
ers then attract followers now? The question or criticism would seem all
the more pertinent in Trinidad, which has developed a tradition of cynical,
distrusting appraisal. Eric Williams, the country’s historian turned inde-
pendence leader and first president, rose to prominence by debunking the
pious sentiments of British abolitionists. Bondage was unprofitable before
it became unpopular, he wrote in Capitalism and Slavery (Williams 1944),
rather than the reverse. In the same spirit, Trinidad’s talented calypsonians
revel in unearthing corruption. Ridicule eventually touches every politi-
cian. Trinis understand complicity all too well. Meanwhile, anthropology
has never privileged the individual over the collective, or the singular in-
sight over the idea widely shared. In writing something like biographies,
then, I am cutting against a grain of local discourse as well as the disci-
plinary sensibilities of my own social science. It is necessary to do so. Or,
rather, my political agenda—to challenge people’s complicity with climate
change—compels the most thorough search for precedents and examples
22 I ntroduction
of life without fossil fuels. In this sense, I resist the label “utopian.” Every-
thing that I and others seek in energy has already happened to someone
or to someplace.
I ntroduction 23
by suggesting that people have already envisioned the abandonment of
oil. I do not share Slavoj Žižek’s (2010, 334) despair in writing that publics
imagine the end of nature more easily than the end of fossil capitalism. For
that latter event, many societies have already trained and know—if only
through their historical archives—more or less what to do. Trinidad once
planned development without oil. There, in the eighteenth century, a Jesuit
designed an agriculture powered only by equatorial sunlight. The governor
of Trinidad harnessed the power of African bodies. Both schemes imag-
ined what we now call alternative energy. A historian—or one narrowly
tethered to chronology—might consign these failed plans to an ash heap
of impractical or immoral attempts. As an anthropologist, I have (or have
taken) the liberty of running history backward, excavating the solutions
that predate problems, and indulging in counterfactual speculation: what
if people had not banished God from the landscape, or what if, from the
wreckage of Caribbean slavery, survivors had salvaged the value of walk-
ing, pedaling legs as useful energy? From off the favored Euro-American
stage, this study engages in what Svetlana Boym (2008, 4) calls “off mod-
ern” thinking—“an exploration of the side alleys and lateral potentialities”
of where we are.
There may be no better way to approach the question posed at the
outset of this introduction: How does it feel to change the climate? How,
furthermore, does it feel not to care? Where, I might add, is conscience,
or guilt? Where—and this is what I also mean by conscience—is a sense of
responsibility or reverence for energy and the world around it? McKibben
wrote in 1989 about living morally with “the end of nature.” He awakes into
an “alertness,” akin to the tensing of a swimmer hearing a distant motor-
boat (McKibben 1989, 49). McKibben’s unease mounted so high that he
founded the first climate change movement in the United States. I would
like us all to acquire the same fear and to respond with a measure of Mc
Kibben’s desperation and generosity. My informants stand at quite some
distance from this position. From petroleum geologists to antitoxic activ-
ists, they mostly don’t care deeply about climate change. They care now and
then, but they don’t care about global warming in that way that one worries
over a sick, elderly relative, growing feeble, losing capacity, heading for a
different state. Perhaps no one cares about climate change in the way that
that senescent person herself faces mortality and the uncertainty of what
lies beyond. The absence of those feelings presents a shape. It has contours
24 I ntroduction
and boundaries. The ethnographer, in conversation with someone vaguely
concerned about climate change, brushes against the skin of that silence,
provoking defensiveness, a glance of recognition, or a joke that both par-
ties know is not funny (cf. Kidron 2009). As much as nonfiction can do,
Energy without Conscience attempts to illuminate that negative space. Let
us see not-feeling-climate-change as a concrete thing. It sits among us like
an antiquated superstition, too customary to discard but too backward to
celebrate. I wish to expose that belief as retrograde and wrong. With this
historical and ethnographic story, I hope to crack the chalice of disregard
still cradling oil, its producers, and its consumers.
I ntroduction 25
This page intentionally left blank
PART I
28
CHAPTER 1
By 1700, the sugar revolution had taken hold just north of Trinidad, on
Barbados. Another British colony, Jamaica, was also enjoying a boom,
as did the French isles of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Dominica. Most
infamously, Saint-Domingue, later Haiti, worked Africans to death by
the thousands. Plantations soon festooned the Caribbean, pumping out
sweetness and wealth. With the notable exception of Trinidad: the island
languished as a colonial failure. Spain neither knew what resources existed
on the island nor garnered investment capable of exploiting more than
a fraction of them. A handful of settlers and a small population of slaves
planted cacao only to suffer a devastating crop blight in 1727. Five years
later, the Jesuit Joseph Gumilla visited for two weeks and recommended
rehabilitating the crop: Madrid, he envisioned, would send landless peas-
ants from Andalusia and the Canary Islands to grow cacao without slaves.1
Solar rays and the natural fecundity of the tropics would guarantee good
harvests. But the Crown sent no one. Then smallpox struck in 1739 ( Joseph
1838, 148). The colony teetered on the edge of ruin. “Even the monkeys
died,” writes V. S. Naipaul, whose novelistic sensibilities capture the era
better than straight history. “The morale of the settlers broke. For a cen-
tury and more they had lived close to nature. Now, ignoring the Spanish
code, they left their huts in Saint Joseph and lived, like the Indians before
them, in the bush” (Naipaul 1969, 123–24). Civilization teetered on the
brink of collapse, a defeat all the more bitter given its Caribbean context.
For the region’s easy money, Trinidad possessed sunshine and fertile soil
but lacked every other necessary element: wealthy settlers of the planter
class, equipment for sugar mills, and, above all, slave labor. Although no
one phrased it in quite that way, Trinidad suffered from a crisis of somatic,
or bodily, energy. For a late sugar revolution, the island needed manpower,
measurable in kilowatt-hours but sought then by the boatload.
Into this breach strode a man shrewd and calculating enough—and
just barely ruthless enough—to succeed. In 1783, the Crown and its in-
tendente (administrator) in Caracas appointed Don Josef Maria Chacón,
a naval brigadier and knight of the Order of Calatrava, to serve as gover-
nor of Trinidad. He was to implement the royal edict, or cédula, of 1783: a
set of reforms intended to encourage planters with slaves to immigrate to
Trinidad. Contemporaries described him as polyglot, indefatigable, and
incorruptible ( Joseph 1838, 160–61, 168). In these qualities, he probably
did not differ substantially from Gumilla. But, in order to implement the
cédula, he disregarded—or, at any rate, did not dredge up—the Jesuit’s
writings. Chacón took as given the need for labor and, in particular, for
unfree labor. This somatic project, however, created its own problems.
The governor struggled with the task of objectifying workers. Enslaved
Africans expressed themselves and acted as individuals, especially when
they absconded from plantations. Even as he sought shipments of human
cargo, Chacón could not easily repress the personalities contained below
decks. Still, he did so well enough to turn the corner in Trinidad. The
colony began to produce, refine, and export sugar—at nowhere near its
potential—but at a level respectable enough to attract attention. London
noticed. Thirteen years into Chacón’s governorship, England captured the
island from Spain without firing a shot. Chacón, who might otherwise have
retired in glory, instead returned to Madrid in disgrace.
To the extent that he did recruit planters and slaves to Trinidad, Chacón
provoked the most profound energy transition of all. He and other traders
of slaves invented fuel. A fuel stores energy in a measurable, countable,
transportable, and salable form. Energy becomes fuel as it becomes a re-
source. But resources—such as lakes or forests—need not move. I write
fuel, then, to emphasize this intrinsically deracinated quality. Solar rays
bore none of these attributes. Gumilla never thought to package sunlight
and send it from sunlit to shady areas or from the tropics to the temperate
zone. Laborers, even slaves, did not automatically assume this commodity
form either. Some served the master and his family over a lifetime, acting
as acknowledged persons in a social field. Other slaves—particularly in the
context of plantations—performed the tasks assigned day in and day out
with no personal recognition from above. Marx wrote of these people as
possessing “labor-power” but without the proletarian’s right or ability to
sell it. Whereas workers might advance by learning new skills, plantation
Scientific Slavery
Trinidad entered the slave trade as a scrounger. Spain lacked the West Afri-
can ports and interior networks so useful to Portugal, Britain, and France.
The empire could only obtain Africans through intermediaries and after
those parties had satisfied their own needs. Trinidad’s status in the em-
pire—as a backwater of a backwater—limited the options further. How
could remote Port of Spain, Trinidad’s capital from 1757, direct the flow
of enslaved Africans to its shores? Scavenging seemed like the only op-
tion. In 1763, as a result of Europe’s Seven Years’ War, Britain acquired the
French Antilles of Dominica, Saint Vincent, Grenada, and Tobago. Cath-
olic planters stayed in place but chafed under Protestant, foreign rule. In-
centives might induce them to leave—and bring their slaves and expertise
to Trinidad. In that expectation, the Crown relaxed its highly protectionist
controls on imports in 1776. Some Frenchmen i sland-hopped to Trinidad,
among them a certain Grenadian planter, Philippe Rose Roume de St. Lau-
rent. Roume immediately sought to recruit more like him. He estimated a
further 379 families were available on Grenada and on Martinique, where
ants were ravaging the cane crop. They would bring 33,322 slaves in tow
and require, Roume estimated, one 3-fanega plot of food crops per group
of seventy.2 (A fanega comprised roughly 7.5 acres, or 3 hectares [ Joseph
1838, 162].) These stipulations would, as he put it later, guarantee “the es-
Slaves as People
Trinidad needed a constant influx of slaves not only to enlarge the supply
but just to stay even. Two forms of offtake drove the population slowly
down. Slaves died—worked to death—and slaves achieved their freedom.
The former circumstance both resulted from and contributed to the treat-
ment of people as labor units. The most oppressive estates handled Afri-
cans as consumables. Fortunately, this style of management did not last.
After the British interdiction of the slave trade in 1807, plantations took
much greater care to ensure that bondsmen reproduced and sustained a
local population. They treated at least female slaves more like breeding cat-
tle than like the sterile, and therefore expendable, mules. Even in Chacón’s
Did the concept of fuel demand this shearing away of meaning? “Certain
forms of knowledge and control,” writes the political scientist James Scott,
“require a narrowing of vision” (1998, 11). The trader of oil cannot sell it
efficiently as long as he or she must record and advertise its place of ori-
gin and vintage. A vintage adds value to wine but can do the opposite for
packages of energy, especially in a high-energy society. One cannot design,
say, a fleet of Cadillacs to run on the particular sour crude of Trinidad and
Tobago. Simply put, fuel functions as a commodity in the contemporary
sense of the term: a crop or mineral traded globally by a standard unit of
measure. Perhaps, then, Chacón accomplished something akin to what
Karl Polanyi (1944) calls “the Great Transformation,” the disembedding of
land, labor, and numerous goods and services from their social context. I
would not go this far. Anthropologists now dispute Polanyi’s claim, finding
embeddedness in everything, even in money (Maurer 2006). Energy lost
something more specific: its landscape. The Middle Passage displaced solar
power and deracinated somatic power. Partly as a consequence, the ability
to do work also lost a certain enchanted quality associated with the sacred.
For Gumilla, sunlight carried virtue and sprang from God, “El Autor de
la Naturaleza.” Neither slavers nor consumers of oil have tended to treat
these forms of energy as God-given. One could do so, however. Perhaps, I
would speculate, we treat oil as mundane for the same reasons Chacón pre-
ferred to treat enslaved African as arms. Standard measures narrow vision
such grandiosity. Oil is always already a cynical category. One might almost
believe that, after the emotional roller coaster of slavery and emancipation,
the designers of energy sought a source of terawatts without drama, with-
out a “commodity affect” (Mankekar 2004, 408). Intentionally or not, they
got that: a fuel so flat that the protester finds little traction with which to
advance. Except when oil spills locally, one treats it as a means, an instru-
ment toward the things that really matter. Useful as it is—perhaps, like
money—oil only rarely touches questions of moral worth. Banally and too
easily, hydrocarbons flow and spill everywhere.
ORDINARY OIL
Author’s son, Jesse, with oil pump jack, Point Fortin, Trinidad, 2010
S I LE NCE S A R E NOT A LW AYS QU I E T .They can resound with
noise and quite articulate speech. They are, as I wrote in the in-
troduction, the absences that present a shape. This second half of
Energy without Conscience explores the contours and discourses
surrounding—and, in a sense, obstructing—what is for me the
core issue: a moral reckoning with hydrocarbons and a sense of
responsibility for climate change. Oil appears all too banal and
ordinary. In this more ethnographic section, my informants grap-
ple with notions of plenty (chapter 3), with industrial accidents
in their neighborhoods (chapter 4), and with environmental vic-
timhood (chapter 5). Expert and popular opinions proliferate in
what seems like a robust debate. Yet nearly all participants draw
back from the cliff ’s edge. They refuse to consider questions of
conscience: if (rather than how fast) one should produce oil, or
whether oil is intrinsically (not incidentally) harmful, or whether
they have perpetrated (not merely suffered from) climate change.
In my fieldwork, a handful of self-aware geologists and policy
makers appreciated these dilemmas. Far more often, their own
expertise and activism proved so interesting that it distracted
them from considering alternatives. Perhaps—if silences are
loud—then complicity is diverting and fulfilling in this way. My
informants did not cover up a shameful secret, as one might imag-
ine knowing perpetrators of harm to do. Climate change, they un-
derstood, was important, and they would deal with it. But they
always found something more pressing: oil to locate, toxins to
fight, or worse offenders to indict. This is the most widespread,
least reproachable form of complicity: an earnest pursuit of local,
immediate, rather ordinary concerns in the run up to apocalypse.
Like stewards rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, one can eas-
ily lose a sense of proportion.
But who I am to criticize these well-meaning Trinidadians?
Many of them, after all, cope with economic circumstances far
more adverse than those of a university professor (although the
energy executives enjoy far better conditions). Before such sub-
alterns, ethnographers usually defer. Waiter-like in their humility,
62
they act as if the c ustomer-informant is always right (Rabinow
1977, 45). My informants, I concluded, are mostly wrong—ei-
ther mistaken on ecological grounds or conducting environmen-
tal malfeasance. And I write forthrightly in that conviction not
only because it is true but also because it matters to us all. Here
again, one might ask why I make Trinidadians’ affairs my business.
The Indian social critic Vandana Shiva famously accuses North
Atlantic environmentalists of practicing an imperialist “global
reach” when they insist, say, that African peasants refrain from
hunting animals. I agree with her in that instance. Hydrocarbons
are different. More so than any other form of environmental
harm or violence, they circulate through the biosphere. Natural
gas burned in or exported from Trinidad circumscribes lives else-
where. Coastal residents of Bangladesh or Vietnam have perhaps
the greatest cause for concern. Still, Superstorm Sandy—which
hit New Jersey after the bulk of my fieldwork—made the threat
to me, my family, and my community apparent. The Trinidadian
energy companies I study bring danger to my doorstep. They are
an empire. So I write with as much anticolonial outrage as colo-
nial arrogance. But above all—and to put aside ill-fitting meta-
phors—I try in this ethnographic section to capture the frustra-
tion and possibility of my own encounter with climate-changing
complicity.
63
This page intentionally left blank
CHAPTER 3
Geology is a science of vertical movement. The things that move are huge
and heavy and move very slowly. So says the uniformitarian theory, pub-
lished in 1830 by the Scotsman Charles Lyell. In some ways, such gradual-
ism defies belief more than did the earlier catastrophist notions of rapid,
biblical creation, flooding, and so on. To follow the vertical movement of
continents, one must inhabit what the environmental writer John McPhee
(1980) calls “deep time.” Over millions of years, eroded sediments may turn
a floodplain into a plateau. One plate will dive down, deflecting its adjacent
plate upward. Describing these acts of elevation requires an otherworldly
lexicon: Holocene, Pleistocene, Pliocene, Miocene, Oligocene, Eocene,
and so on going back to Earth’s pre-Cambrian beginning as a lifeless, cool-
ing moon of the sun. The communicative art of geology lies in making this
deep time comprehensible without, at the same time, utterly dispelling its
strangeness. Verticality helps strike that balance. The amateur may more
easily grasp a thousand feet than a million years. The up-and-down axis,
in fact, compresses time. Then, superposition—the principle that layers
fall sequentially upon one another—translates descending distance into
antiquity and shallowness into newness. Geologists distinguish strata as
upper and lower and periods as late and early, but, as often as not, they
interchange the terms. The past stretches as an arrow piercing the heart
of the earth. One need not imagine much to extend that arrow into the
future—as thrusting, gushing, and seeping movements up through and
out of the crust. The pressures of profit can easily bake geology into such
a predictive belief. In this way, Trinidad and other oil crucibles produced
what one might call a vernacular science of hydrocarbon uplift. As in many
technical fields, petro experience affords little space for alternatives and less
for the most challenging ethical questions.
That amoral vernacular is more visual than linguistic. It relies upon im-
3.2 Wall and Sawkins’s traverse section of the Pitch Lake, 1860.
ing the former, but their very existence indicated that dense petroleum
still lay deeper. “You could be looking at double, triple the reserves,” he
exclaimed, as we sat in his home office in South Trinidad.7 Possessed of
a gentle, good-natured humor, Persad frequently slipped between dense
science and less scientific buoyancy. We met again the next month—Feb-
ruary 2012—in Port of Spain at the Energy Chamber’s annual Energy Con-
ference. To the chamber’s large membership, Persad presented “Finding
Oil in t&t’s Unexplored Acreage.” The acreage lay below explored strata.
“If you drilled deep,” he almost pleaded to the suit-attired executives, “you
would find black oil.” The oil itself was going half the distance. Persad’s
second slide, titled “Source Rock Maturation,” united two concepts usu-
ally considered separately: the generation, or maturation, of oil in deep
sediments and its later migration into shallower formations (figure 3.8). In
the cross section, one pathway took oil all the way to a surface seep. The
slide show ended with a note of hope and a surprisingly precise scenario:
short-term, medium-term, and longer-term estimates culminated in a “to-
tal potential upwards of 3 billion bbls [barrels] recoverable.”8 The geolo-
gist’s eyes twinkled at the audience. Such confidence, of course, flowed
like the liquor at the Energy Conference. Persad enjoyed himself amid the
glitter of the Hyatt Hotel. Having once told me any conference was worth
going to “if it helps me produce a barrel of oil,” he made more petroleum
seem guaranteed.
Proving Up
By 2010, Trinidad’s oil and gas club was addressing climate change substan-
tively—but still under an assumption of oil inevitability. The sector was
beginning to treat environmentalism as an “aboveground risk,” in a class
with sabotage and nationalization. The risk lay in the possibility that scien-
tists and activists might persuade consumers to cut their carbon emissions
radically. In Trinidad as elsewhere, hydrocarbon insiders imagine such a
then rose through the chimneys to “orifices,” which included the Pitch
Lake and similar features in Venezuela (30). Extraction appeared to prove
this point. As one dug pitch, Messerly observed, the substance flowed in
to fill the hole. It toppled in from the sides, certainly, but also welled up
from the bottom of any hole or cavity. “Vertical pushing” smoothed the
asphalt in La Brea (19). Were it not so, depressions would remain at the
sites of extraction. The earth’s crust, in other words, always replenished
what one digger had taken from another. This upwelling suggested new
nomenclature. Messerly chided those authorities who had “very improp-
If, as Raymond Williams writes, rural nostalgia contrasts capital with com-
munity, La Brea created useful history of both kinds in the twentieth cen-
tury. In the wake of the Darwent well (see chapter 3), oil production spread
throughout the southern tier of the island and to the Pitch Lake. La Brea
became an oil town—as well as a pitch town—surrounded by the infra-
structure and staff housing of British and American oil companies (Higgins
1996, 180ff.). Wells, oil tanks, and ponds of water filtered from oil dotted the
environs. The industry cut many corners in those early days. The infamous
Dome Fire of 1928 killed sixteen workers and bystanders (de Verteuil 1996).
Outside the actual fields, all the companies practiced blatant discrimina-
tion. They limited the rise of black and Indian workers and squeezed them
into crowded, segregated accommodations known as barracks. Frustration
eventually boiled over in strikes, riots, and sabotage in 1937. By midcentury,
however, the industry seemed to have overcome these growing pains. It no
longer caused visible, violent damage. Trinidadian workers advanced, gain-
ing in expertise and managerial positions. Meanwhile, as its oil fields were
depleted, La Brea suffered a slow decline. Natural gas, liquefied nearby
in Point Fortin, became the country’s leading natural resource. Still, La
Brea did not go bust. Unlike its codiscoverer of petroleum—Titusville,
Pennsylvania—South Trinidad stayed in the hydrocarbon business (Black
2000, 189). The town continued to bring up pitch and some oil, leaven-
ing the technological sublime with a measure of nostalgia. Born in 1928,
Arthur Forde recalled the La Brea of his youth as the “industrial capital
of the Caribbean”: “We were more modernize [sic] than any other village
in Trinidad.”2 Misty-eyed, his memory called to mind a hamlet of machin-
ery—and reconciled all the apparent contradictions in that sensibility.
At his snack shop—across from seeps that sometimes burned spon-
taneously—Forde also gave me a lead. Agatha Proud, he confided, once
owned the Pitch Lake. Chasing these rumors became my obsession. Peo-
Lake Asphalt. Having exported material for major bridge and tunnel proj-
ects worldwide, the company had recently perfected the bitumen pellet.
In this bullish atmosphere, the firm hosted its annual calypso competition
just before Carnival. I bought my ticket and, as a foreign curiosity, soon
found myself in the deafeningly loud vip section. While amply wined and
dined, I heard two songs mentioning the smelter. Alfred Antoine’s lyrics
sympathized with a woman protesting aluminum, regretting that “indus-
trialization, it come to stay.”14 I followed up with him. A casual worker—
possibly uneasy in the head office where we later met—Antoine backed
away from any criticism of the smelter. “I for industrialization,” he assured
me, but he associated the term with future projects only.15 Trinidad Lake
Asphalt fell outside this category. The second calypsonian, Roger Achong,
worked as a well-paid chemist. His calypso praised “Mother earth [who]
will bless and see you through” and pronounced the smelter “an environ-
mental blight.” At the same time, he endorsed “fires of progress . . . burning
bright” and criticized oil and gas only for their depletion.16 In our conver-
At the national level, the movement against smelters began with tropes
closer to standard, agrarian pastoralism. In 2006, the government first sug-
gested manufacturing aluminum at Chatham (deGannes 2013, 3). Down
the Cedros Peninsula and past La Brea, this village lay beyond the arc of in-
dustrial sites. Indo-Trinidadians raised crops and fished in a string of inland
settlements and beachside villages. They occupied a patchwork woodland
described in Jamaica as “ruinate” (Cliff 1987, 1; Maisier 2015, 117). The pres-
ent seemed to constantly churn through the past. This temporal topogra-
phy fit the popular “racial landscape” of South Trinidad—where descen-
dants of indentured laborers still worked the land (Khan 1997, 4). Prime
Minister Patrick Manning and his mostly Afro-Trinidadian cabinet seemed
bent on industrializing that village life. Then a fortuitous discovery both
deepened the heritage of Chatham and gave it African roots. In August
2006, archaeologists uncovered Bou’Kongo, an early nineteenth-century
settlement of slaves freed in the Middle Passage by the British navy. Bur-
ton Sankeralli, a public intellectual attached to the University of the West
Indies, accompanied the expedition. Later, he published his diary. “An
African liberated village,” he narrates breathlessly, “the Congo nation,
In between forays in the oil belt and conferences with oilmen, I conducted
ethnography within Port of Spain’s “climate intelligentsia.” I apply this term
to a loosely linked group of professionally successful men and women,
born in Trinidad and belonging to African and Indian ethnicities. All had
earned bachelor’s degrees, and many had studied further in the United
States, Canada, or Britain. They knew the facts of climate change, and they
cared enough to join public discussions about it. To these scientists, activ-
ists, policy makers, and energy specialists, I introduced myself as a fellow
traveler: an environmental anthropologist writing a book on energy policy.
Together, in 2010, we participated in a round of public consultations on
the country’s first policy regarding climate change. The participants might
have considered carbon emissions and means of reducing them. Instead,
the consultations and the policy centered on impacts: environmental haz-
ards, including even threats to oil’s infrastructure. In a fashion I had not
anticipated, my informants positioned Trinidad and Tobago as a victim
of climate change. Evidence suggested otherwise. The country was enjoy-
ing the status of a middle-income country, with gasoline and electricity so
amply subsidized that many people consumed them wastefully. Therefore,
Trinidad and Tobago’s per capita carbon emissions ranked fourth among
nation-states (International Energy Agency 2010, 95–97). These statistics
omit the oil and gas Trinidad extracts for exports. Among hydrocarbon
producers, Trinidad and Tobago occupies t hirty-eighth place—not an
enormous contributor, but still larger than Bahrain and Ecuador combined
(United Nations Statistics Division 2009, 40–72). In short, Trinidadians
were collectively benefiting from the lethal hydrocarbon system and, in so
doing, exacerbating climate change. Their seas rise in what Ulrich Beck
(1992, 23) calls the “boomerang effect”—where pollution bounces back
onto the polluter. With these informants, my conversations sometimes
bordered on arguments, as instructive as they were contentious. No one
broke off contact, and all seemed to consider our debate one worth having.
I kept probing for an answer to the question: how and why did the climate
intelligentsia frame the country as unequivocally innocent? Innocence, af-
ter all, amounts to a license to pollute.
Blame often travels in the simplest form possible—or so cultural ex-
pressions would suggest. Inhabitants of the Torres Straits, for instance, are
“sinking without a trace [as] Australia’s climate change victims” (“Sinking
without a Trace” 2008). Victim serves as an absolute category of people
both vulnerable to and innocent of the given crime. It was not always
so: psychology of the 1950s and 1960s diagnosed individuals as enabling
cruelty (Fassin 2009, 122). Some still blame attractive women for rape.
Experts on climate change have never dabbled in this kind of ambiguity.
In any case, they would have a hard time blaming the isles of the Straits:
their carbon emissions barely surpass zero. But the category of victimhood
has expanded well beyond the shores of this and other subsistence-level
archipelagos. In the media, fully industrialized societies—ranging from
China to Bahrain to Louisiana—represent themselves as victims. Hurri-
cane Sandy swept through the energy-intensive suburbs of my state, New
Jersey, leaving millions of victims but no one willing publicly to accept
partial responsibility. Under new climates, hardship redeems in an almost
Christian fashion. It renders or maintains the polluter’s conscience pure.
In this widely distributed form, I argue, victimhood increasingly consti-
tutes a slot. M
ichel-Rolph Trouillot (1991) defines this term as an endur-
ing category of thought and enquiry, one that canalizes and disciplines
scholarly work. Renaissance Europe created the “savage slot,” he writes,
and anthropologists still explain the Other within its confines. Tania Li
(2000) uses “slot” slightly differently: as a durable political tool that marks
and separates “tribal” people from populations nearby and straddling the
boundary. The victim slot exhibits all these features. It draws strength
from archaic geographies and cleaves social groups radically and irrevers-
ibly from close comparators. Under climate change, emitters of carbon
dioxide—even high emitters—have deliberately occupied or accidentally
fallen into this compartment. Like the savage slot or the tribal slot, the
victim slot artificially clarifies an inherently murky moral situation. It
At roughly the time of Walcott’s Nobel award, Trinidad began to use this
insular imaginary as a diplomatic trump card. In the 1990s, the country
faced a choice of alliances: identify with complicit hydrocarbon producers
or with the world’s innocent archipelagos. Besides Bahrain, only Trinidad
and Tobago—at that time—could claim belonging among both of these
groups. Although it did not export enough oil to join opec, Trinidad did
share oil and gas fields with the p etro-powerhouse Venezuela. In the 1990s,
it experienced a gas boom, leading to rapid capital accumulation and re-
source nationalism (Mottley 2008). Why did this m ineral-based pride not
provoke Trinidad and Tobago’s Foreign Ministry to represent the country
as an oil state? Hydrocarbons never generated wealth fast enough to pro-
voke an identity-shifting faith in or fear of them. Even the captains of this
industry did not begin to feel secure until the gas boom of the 1990s. Port
of Spain’s diplomats, then, have never carried off the swagger of opec. In-
stead, in the 1990s, they chose to huddle at the other extreme of political
and economic power, with the states most prey to environmental and eco-
nomic shocks. Alienated by the bluster of Tehran, Trinidad performed the
suffering of Tuvalu. It joined the Alliance of Small Island States (aosis),
a bloc that soon came to represent those most desperately vulnerable to
climate change (Lazrus 2009). Indeed, this body “produced” small islands
as a category and as a blameless, ethical position (Moore 2010, 116). To the
Assessing Vulnerability
Faced with climate change, it was easy for islanders to sound the alarm.
Rising seas threatened them immediately and visibly—and also exoner-
ated them. Especially in a European-dominated milieu, encirclement by
water suggests frailty and weakness. Atolls have lain prone before natural
elements as well as total genocide, slavery, and colonialism. They can credi-
bly pass as victims in waiting of the next great injustice. Ecology still marks
them as “tropical island Edens” (Grove 1995). Mostly, then, small island
states do belong in the category of climate change innocents. The Maldives
recently committed to cutting its carbon emissions to zero. Except under
those absolute conditions, however, some islanders surely belong in the
I was living in Port of Spain when the Deepwater Horizon oil platform ex-
ploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico. British Petroleum (bp) had drilled
into the Macondo field under 5,000 feet of ocean water and through 13,000
feet of rock. Geologists and engineers had joined the heroic effort to find
oil in ever-more difficult and dangerous circumstances. On April 20, 2010,
gas surged up the well under high pressure. The blowout preventer failed,
and the blowout killed eleven workers (Konrad and Shroder 2011). My
Trini informants sympathized immediately with the dead, men largely for-
gotten in the frenzy of American reporting. Then, these experts criticized
bp: it operated in a slipshod, unprofessional manner, lining its well with
inferior cement. A Trinidadian firm manufactured better cement, and even
bptt—the local subsidiary of bp—would not have made such stupid, irre-
sponsible errors. Safety started to sound self-righteous. As the well bled oil
in its second month, I visited the office of bptt. Just to enter the building, I
had to endure a fifteen-minute safety video—mostly about where to flee in
case of fire. I wondered when the industry would look up from local flames
to see the spill everywhere. For the geologist Rick Bass, the Macondo well
served as a teachable moment. In a new foreword to Oil Notes—written
in the midst of the spill—he calls for “a truer accounting of the full costs
of dirty carbon” (Bass 2012, xix). At about that time, however, as the spill
entered its third month, my informants began to rekindle, in themselves,
Bass’s original enthusiasm for oil exploration. “Now do you get it?” they
asked me. British Petroleum had done nothing but perforate the caprock,
and geological pressure was producing huge volumes every day. This is
how it comes up, they explained. It seemed beautiful, natural, and inevi-
table. No one said as much, but the hemorrhage at the bottom of the sea
seemed to prove that oil should come up, not that it shouldn’t.
How does an anthropologist position himself in the midst of such harm
and such harmful thinking? When burned in large volumes, hydrocarbons
wreak havoc. One cannot think otherwise without denying the findings of
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Here science and ethnog-
raphy stand at cross-purposes. The ethnographer frequently searches for
the common decency and goodwill that binds informants, readers, and the
ethnographer himself. This thread does the work of translation, rendering
the unfamiliar somewhat familiar. As a literary theme, hydrocarbons could
do this job: they circulate nearly everywhere. Bass embraces his audience
when he declares, “We are all complicit: the oil finders and the oil users”
(2012, xix). I could have written that sort of book. But another principle
of ethnography compels me to describe difference. The oil finders differ
fundamentally from the oil users, a billion of whom consume next to zero
anyway (Malm and Hornborg 2014, 65). Even heavy consumers driving
American roads relate but distantly to the substance. Many could switch
to other power sources and other technologies: buses, bicycles, or cars
running on electricity generated from sunlight and wind. “Finders” work
precisely to delay that substitution. They prove up supplies even as proven
reserves greatly exceed what the atmosphere can safely absorb before 2050
(McGlade and Elkins 2015). These petroleum professionals live from oil,
and the most passionate live for oil as well. No ethical choice would be easy
for them. Most fail even to see the essential ethical choice. Christine Bader,
for instance, identifies herself as a “corporate idealist.” In the early 2000s,
she started bp’s program for social responsibility, emphasizing the rights of
oil workers and neighboring communities. The spill “broke her heart.” Cor-
porate idealists, she concluded, should ask, “What are the greatest tensions
that the core business of this company and industry have [sic] with the
best interests of society?” (Bader 2014, 128, 193). Those tensions, Bader be-
lieves, center on mishaps or malfeasance at the point of production. She has
only scratched the surface. Canada’s i ndustry-created Ethical Oil campaign
suffers from a similar shallowness. The core business of any oil company
damages the whole world. Conscience cannot abide the spill everywhere.
Near Misses
Fossil fuels were never foreordained. Near misses and contingencies have
pushed Trinidad and much of the world toward hydrocarbons. Yet the
most sweeping accounts of energy transitions suggest an unstoppable
142 Conclusion
juggernaut. Vaclav Smil (2008, 380) refers to a “law of maximized energy
flows” under which civilizations continually exploit denser fuels in more
efficient ways. Nuclear fission and the latest experiments in fusion, argues
the geographer Alfred Crosby, “count as triumphs in the quest of the chil-
dren of the sun for more energy” (2006, 5). Perhaps the notion of a quest
confers nobility on something ultimately squalid, reframing missteps as
breakthroughs. Even critics—who wish to derail the train of fossil fuels—
trace environmental ruin to the dna of our species. Homo erectus walked
resolutely out of Africa, recalls Elizabeth Kolbert, a leading popularizer of
climate science. Modern humans settled the world and burned its forests
and much else as well. “And now we go to Mars. We never stop” (Kolbert
2014, 251).1 So far neither Kolbert nor the paleoanthropologist she quotes
has left Earth, and no one lives on Mars. The possible technology, in other
words, only becomes real under the right circumstances. Meanwhile, other
possibilities bear no fruit at all. In Trinidad, chance favored oil and gas, fuels
that perform far worse—in environmental terms—than the alternatives.
The island thus missed moments and movements that were both solar
and utopian. In part, sunshine lacked competent champions. In 1732, Jo-
seph Gumilla noticed a sunlit floral feast, harvested effortlessly by Amerin-
dians and equally available to Spanish farmers. Cultivators of cacao would
have to immigrate. No ship could load insolation and carry it across the
Atlantic. That tether to place made solar energy more democratic. Elites
could only monopolize it by monopolizing the land—a common occur-
rence now but less feasible in the eighteenth-century Americas. If settlers
had come, they might have proved Gumilla right. Madrid, however, did not
take the Jesuit seriously enough to fund his idea or even to value local life-
ways. Very likely, his spellbound demeanor—inspired by the enchantment
of energy and nature—failed to impress those who allocated vessels and
supplies. This conundrum accompanied solar power: wonder at its unseen
plenty discouraged the quantitative and managerial approach necessary to
exploit it. Certainly, Conrad Stollmeyer failed to square this circle. Still, in
1845, he and Adolphus Etzler got farther than Gumilla. They recruited and
transported Englishmen to a utopian colony to be powered by sun, wind,
and tropical nature in general. Tropical pathogens slew the settlers before
Stollmeyer and Etzler could build a converter of solar into mechanical
power. In fact, the two men barely grasped the design specifications of their
Satellite. In 1861, the French mathematician Augustin Mouchot patented
Conclusion 143
the first solar-powered pump (Butti and Perlin 1980, 67). But, by that time,
Stollmeyer was working—very competently now—with hydrocarbons.
For Trinidad, the sun rose, so to speak, just a little too late.
Timing also failed in the case of somatic power. At the end of the eigh-
teenth century, Josef Chacón knew how to harness the energy of muscle
and bone, and he did harness it. He transported “arms” from other islands to
Trinidad and across the wide Atlantic. Plantation slaves flowed like fuel—
indeed, as the first transoceanic global fuel commodity. There was nothing
utopian about this arrangement: elites monopolized the trade and, through
their racism, monopolized the very idea of humanity. If solar power opened
one’s vision, slavery narrowed it to a thin slit. And slavery contaminated the
very idea of harnessing human energy. In the nineteenth century, Trinidad
tacked from one extreme to another: from the utter exploitation of human
energy to revulsion at the mere hint of it. Earl Lovelace begins The Dragon
Can’t Dance—arguably Trinidad’s national novel—with a reminiscence of
Laventille, Port of Spain’s slum. The residents’ ancestors “took a stand in
the very guts of the slave plantation, among tobacco and coffee and cotton
and canes, asserting their humanness in the most wonderful acts of sab-
otage they could imagine and perform, making a religion of laziness and
neglect and stupidity and waste. . . . After Emancipation . . . they turned
up this hill to pitch camp here on the eyebrow of the enemy, to cultivate
again with no less fervor the religion with its Trinity of Idleness, Laziness,
and Waste” (Lovelace 1979, 2–3). Anyone anywhere may enjoy leisure. But
it may be particularly difficult in Trinidad, the United States, and other
postemancipation societies to propose muscle as a performer of work. At
one of the policy consultations on climate change (see chapter 5), I rec-
ommended tree-lined bicycle lanes in Port of Spain. From Laventille or
from my own neighborhood of Cascade, I suggested further, one could
pedal to work in the cool shade, free of traffic and parking problems. “But I
don’t want that,” wailed one consultant. His response seemed natural, and
no Trini environmentalist challenged it.2 Through its overreach, slavery
exalted idleness and invalidated a low-carbon source of energy.
Even then—having rejected so many alternatives—Trinidad might
have reaped the maximum social reward from petroleum. Agriculture and
industry on the island might have used pitch, oil, and gas to underwrite
postemancipation equality and leisure. Here, too, individual temperaments
misaligned with technological possibility. Stollmeyer had once wished to
144 Conclusion
obviate all human labor. He distilled pitch into fuel after, rather than before,
his encounter with freedmen and their trinity. That experience shriveled
Stollmeyer’s faculties. He appears to have grown racist and even vindictive,
far more eager to see blacks bent double under bitumen loads than to see
them lounging under a tree. He and other capitalists deflected a potential
leisure dividend toward more production. I first learned of Stollmeyer’s
humanitarianism through Johnny Stollmeyer, who lived along my jogging
route in St. Ann’s. He worked as a horticulturalist. I met him among oppo-
nents to La Brea’s aluminum smelter. “We need to be preparing ourselves,”
he advised me, “to all live within the photosynthetic carrying capacity of
our bioregion.”3 His family had certainly changed its tune, I joked. Not find-
ing this quip funny, Johnny informed me of his great-great-grandfather’s
idealism. Following consciously in those footsteps, the younger Stollmeyer
dreamed of small-scale agrarian villages—subsidized, presumably, by the
country’s wealth in hydrocarbons. Perhaps pitch and fraternal substances
could, at last, pay a utopian dividend. Meanwhile, Johnny was planting
trees for the liquefied natural gas plant, helping it to compensate for the
destruction of landscapes in Point Fortin. Afforestation satisfied him in the
short term. For one reason or another, the most free-thinking Trinis have
failed to criticize the principle of burning oil and gas itself.
I lived through one of the more evident missed opportunities in 2010.
Trinidad’s antipollution movement had identified carbon dioxide as one of
a number of risks. Was a movement against hydrocarbons about to begin?
Activists protested the multipollutant smelter complex. Then, as Wayne
Kublalsingh and others defeated the smelter itself, they acquiesced to the
adjoining power plant, the complex’s only emitter of carbon dioxide. Crit-
ics might have quashed both facilities. But carbon emissions did not rank
high enough as a moral and environmental issue. The following year, as
La Brea’s power plant rose from the ground, it provoked a different kind
of concern. Absent the smelter, how could the electrical grid benefit from
a 50 percent boost in wattage? In 2011, a panel of the Green Business Fo-
rum considered this question. “We have a lot more power capacity than
we do demand,” lamented Dax Driver of the Energy Chamber.4 Surplus
electricity had already invalidated plans for a wind farm. Joth Singh, head
of the Environmental Management Authority, conceded, “What I see . . .
is a percentage of renewable energy on the grid, if it is going to happen at
all.”5 No percentage will happen unless the country’s environmental poli-
Conclusion 145
tics undergo a sea change. Now considered the environmental conscience
of Trinidad, Kublalsingh has been protesting the route of a new highway
not far from La Brea. He conducted a months-long hunger strike in 2014.
From his bed, the emaciated man wrote against imperialism, capitalism,
plantations, and—more diffidently—against heavy industry too. “The
lands should be used,” he insists, “to create an altered, supplementing the
oil and gas paradigm, economic platform for the island and the Caribbean”
(Kublalsingh 2014, 4; emphasis added). “Supplementing” is not sustain-
able. To mitigate climate change, Trinidad and all the petrostates will need
to replace the paradigm of hydrocarbons. So far, contingencies, political
will, and (mostly absent) conscience have backed Trinidad’s status quo.
Against Fuel
Closer to my home, the politics of oil are changing. On the streets of Wash-
ington and New York, people are now challenging the spill everywhere
with mixtures of hope, fear, and anger. In 2011, Bill McKibben launched a
movement against the importation of oil derived from Alberta’s so-called
tar sands. A generation before, he had published The End of Nature, the first
jeremiad against climate change for a popular American audience. “How
should I cope,” he asked in the book, “with the sadness of watching nature
end in our lifetimes, and with the guilt of knowing that each one of us is in
some measure responsible?” (McKibben 1989, xxv). This literary shift into
a moral key did not inspire masses of American readers either to protest
fossil fuels or to cut their own emissions. But, in the tar sands, McKibben
found a stirring set of symbols: the heavy hydrocarbon—which also flows
through La Brea—requires strip mining and chemical-intensive process-
ing. Extraction has polluted the Athabasca River and sickened many First
Nations people living downstream. If approved by the U.S. president, the
Keystone xl pipeline to Houston could cause the same damage in the
heartland of the United States—and would certainly raise carbon emis-
sions. Through this geography, McKibben linked local spills to the global
spill. In 2011, he forged a broad alliance between indigenous people and
ranchers in the Great Plains and more conventional, coastal environmen-
talists. I too joined immediately, as did Eden Shand, Trinidad’s former
deputy minister of the environment, then living in Delaware. “I was at the
front of the march,” he related breathlessly to me on the streets of Washing-
146 Conclusion
c.1 Shand’s Face-
book post of Feb-
ruary 19, 2013. He
added the caption,
“That’s me with
Bill McKibben,
leader of the Cli-
mate Action rally
in D.C. He’s there
for the children of
the future.”
ton, DC, in 2013, posting a photo to his Facebook page (figure c.1). (Note
his stoop, damage done by the gravel truck on the Savannah.) Meanwhile,
McKibben and his organization, known as 350.org, targeted all fossil fuels
everywhere. In 2014, close to 400,000 of us marched in Manhattan. Finally,
a popular movement against hydrocarbons was emerging in the United
States. It has a long way to go. A tv news reporter captured my family at the
end of the New York march. “David Hughes and teenage son Jesse drove in
from New Jersey,” she narrated—inaccurately—that night. The reporter
had not asked us about our means of transport. She assumed that people
cross distance in cars, and most of her story concerned the demonstration’s
disruption of city traffic.6 What will it take to get more—and more influen-
tial—Americans and Trinis to rethink business as usual?
To start with, producers and users might rethink hydrocarbons en-
tirely, as something more than fuel. A cultural reform—complementing
the more explicitly political dissent—is long overdue. Geologists, econo-
mists, and other experts on oil and gas still propagate a myth of liquidity
and inevitability. Stratigraphy is destiny, they feel, and the Earth practi-
Conclusion 147
cally ejects hydrocarbons. “That oil is coming up,” Krishna Persad always
assured me. Otherwise it would be “stranded,” like a shipwrecked sailor
on a desert island. What if we thought of oil as stranded in the fashion of
nineteenth-century Africans, relieved to be left on their coast as the last
slave ship sails away? With emancipation, elites turned their back on an
energy source. Plenty of it still remained, and it still carried out a useful
economic function. Somatic energy of course continued to power produc-
tion—through wage labor—but never with the same throughput as in the
body-consuming, body-killing sugar plantation. Simply put, no one legally
uses people as fuel in industry anymore. Few can even imagine such a mo-
tivation, so immoral is slavery now considered. Oil might become the new
slavery. At least some writers have suggested the analogy.7 Canadian critic
Andrew Nikiforuk refers to a “new servitude” in which “the values of one
energy system have been neatly imposed on the other.” Like masters of the
Old South, high emitters consume energy profligately and mostly in the
pursuit of luxuries and luxurious degrees of comfort (Nikiforuk 2012, 70).
The historian Jean-François Mouhot confesses to his own participation in
bondage because, as he argues, “Suffering resulting (directly) from slavery
and (indirectly) from the excessive burning of fossil fuels are now morally
comparable” (Mouhot 2011, 329). Perhaps the strain in this comparison
will fade. Masters of oil will have to leave it in the ground, like slave masters
relinquishing their human property and leaving Africans alone. People of
good conscience will eventually strand conscienceless forms of energy. Oil
will pass from inevitable to immoral to impossible.
This “new abolitionism” recalls the old, enchanted sensibility toward
energy (Hayes 2014). How might one undo the monochromatic, flat at-
titude encapsulated in the idea of fuel? How might one revive the “moral
panic” that accompanied movements for emancipation (Wahab 2010, 100)?
Before that point, long before any pipelines were built, Chacón devised the
idea of a disenchanted, rootless, o cean-crossing standard unit of energy.
Unwittingly, he replaced Gumilla’s full-throated adoration of God-given,
plant-powering sunlight. Blessings became barrels. As is now clear, oil car-
ries a vast negative blessing, a curse. Through combustion and conversion
into carbon dioxide, hydrocarbons spread a scourge upon the face of the
Earth, destroying natural and human communities. Increasingly, this al-
most religious, apocalyptic indictment rings true. But its less censorious in-
verse may catch on more quickly: imagine oil as a positive blessing, indeed,
148 Conclusion
so powerful and so precious that one would want to use it sparingly, rev-
erently. One might drive a car rarely and with immense fulfillment. Mimi
Sheller proposes this approach to aluminum. Each 12-ounce can takes
3 ounces of gasoline equivalent to produce. Currently, we treat those con-
tainers as “cheap t hrow-away material.” “We must become reenchanted,”
she pleads, “with the magic of aluminum’s contribution to our capacity for
lightness, speed, mobility, and flight but also wary of . . . environmental
destruction” (Sheller 2014, 261). Moralized in this way, combustion would
constitute a vice, pricking the conscience as a risky pleasure. Traders might
still measure oil in barrels and transport it as a global commodity. Dia-
monds come in carats too, and the consumer proceeds with caution, releas-
ing the mineral genie only when necessary or truly important. Of course,
much else must happen: governments need to regulate oil, gas, and coal.
They need to provide cheap, widespread public transportation. They need
to convert electrical grids to wind and solar power. Overall, states need
to undo the short-term, profit-driven capitalism under which so much of
the world now lives (Klein 2014). Meanwhile, and in a less economic and
political sense, anyone may help end domination by fossil fuels through
veneration for them.
By the same token, anyone can embrace green energy through an act
of imagination. Capitalism, markets, and so on hardly constrain us; for
sunlight exceeds the bounds of any commodity form. Continuously, the
sun sends 162,000 terawatts of energy into the atmosphere of the Earth,
of which 128,000 remain in the terrestrial environment. By comparison,
fossil fuels contribute less than 12 terawatts, a drop in the solar bucket.8 We
enjoy star rays everyday—and not primarily as electricity from solar pan-
els. Michel Cazabon painted energy in two forms: the Pitch Lake in 1857
and, through his entire life, solar power. As described in a recent novel, he
was constantly “trying . . . to see the light falling on bamboos” (Scott 2012,
459). Rays make art. They also enable surprisingly strategic alternatives to
fossil fuels. Shortly after he joined Trinidad’s Carbon Reduction Strategy
Task Force, Krishna Persad invited me to a one-day cricket match. Sitting
in stands named after Conrad Stollmeyer, he shared his idea of piping
natural gas to every home in Trinidad. Residents would run their clothes
dryers directly on natural gas, rather than less efficiently on electricity de-
rived from gas. “I’ve got something better than any of that,” I boasted, “a
solar-powered clothes dryer.” “Really?” he turned away from the game and
Conclusion 149
toward me. “What’s the technology?” “It’s a long, thin technology,” I said
coyly, “fairly cheap and widely available.” “It’s not available here,” he con-
tradicted me. “Do you have it up in the States?” “Yes, but it works much
better in Trinidad, at lower latitudes. We went around like this, slowly and
somewhat stupidly because of the rum Persad had thoughtfully brought.
Finally, laughing, I disclosed the technology: a clothesline. Sunlight will
not be bottled—at least not nearly all of it.
Like the young Conrad Stollmeyer, I dream of a utopia. Utopias begin with
a revolution in political and economic conditions and culminate in a “new
person.” Imre Szeman calls for “new ways of making subjects, which can be
the only hope for the planet we collectively inhabit” (2014, 462). Such a re-
form may unfold with less effort than Szeman implies. It begins with filling
the moral void around energy. In that space, high emitters would express a
growing sense of responsibility for climate change. Anyone might wonder
at energy. Fusing both sentiments, this new subject would subscribe to a
postfuel notion of the ability to do work. In connection with wind power,
for instance, Robert Righter (2002) describes “energy landscapes” pulsing
with blades both beautiful and technologically sublime. Harvesting energy
from the planet’s surface in this way invites people to reengage with their
surroundings. Neighbors of turbines see energy daily. Rather than merely
consuming it by the gallon or the kilowatt, they cohabit with it. Or they
collaborate even more concretely. Andrew Mathews (2014, 6) refers to
“domesticating the carbon cycle” as Italian foresters gather energy from
biomass. They are not merely cultivating, harvesting, or harnessing wood.
On a larger scale, they understand their role in a p lanet-wide circulation
essential to life and due for rebalancing. Thus, new thinking about energy
might focus simultaneously on the near at hand and on far-reaching jour-
neys. I do not mean to suggest only that one treat certain commodities as
fetishes of good conscience (Carrier 2010). We should consume less and,
first of all, notice the flow of these substances into and through our lives.
Sustainability, then, benefits from attention and mindfulness to objects
and the energy consumed in making them. In this form, we might find an
attainable utopia: a way of treasuring the ability to do work.
At root, I am asking you to imagine what energy has lost. As the history
and ethnography in these pages make clear, energy has become an object of
150 Conclusion
political economy—and merely that. Readers may interpret the foregoing
chapters in two ways. First, I have traced the pathways of various hydro-
carbon commodities: bitumen, oil, and natural gas. In each case, supply
and demand became and remained robust. Even before hydrocarbons, cer-
tain residents of the Caribbean demanded slaves and, in so doing, strung
together the first intercontinental energy market. None of these protago-
nists, though, has simply bought and sold. They have imagined energy as
one thing and not as another. Here is the second gloss on Energy without
Conscience. From Chacón to Stollmeyer to Persad to Kublalsingh to Man-
ning, influential Trinis have constructed a mental model of the ability to do
work. As they bought, sold, and debated that good, they branded it as one
thing: as a necessary, available, unquestionable means to everything mod-
ern. Even as modernity transformed one product after another—from
sugar through to plastics—producers and consumers perpetuated this
narrow vision of energetic means. In imagining those means as fuel, they
cut off other ways of thinking about energy. Not deliberately—but sys-
tematically, nonetheless—all parties to Trinidad’s oil economy exempted
the substance from moral analysis. Here is the greatest complicity: the
failure to consider alternatives and to apply conscience to those choices.
Throughout the hydrocarbon age—in Trinidad and beyond—so many
people have extracted and burned so much with so little pause or reflec-
tion. What if one did pause and consider paths not taken, options once
available and perhaps still at hand? Only a handful of my informants—peo-
ple like the p olitician-turned-protester Eden Shand—willed themselves
to see the profound decision all around them. So many other people have,
in a blandly unimaginative way, brought the world to the brink of disaster.
The nagging question that remains is one of attitude. In what tone—
and on what common ground—should one write or speak of fossil fu-
els and their loyalists? What can an anthropologist and an ethnographer
contribute through writing? Occasionally, in Energy without Conscience,
I have employed the condescending, judgmental tone of one who sees
the future. Perhaps I should apologize for insulting some Trinidadians,
for labeling them as complicit and conscienceless in the face of planetary
harm. Rather than retract, I will end more bluntly still: the p etro-geologists
among my informants are in the wrong and doing wrong. I did not find
them to be exceptionally greedy or underhanded, but I did detect a moral
problem. They take credit for producing hydrocarbons while disavowing
Conclusion 151
blame for climate change. The costs of this abdication remain obscured,
but soon they will break into view and provoke a widespread rejection
of fossil fuels. I write with a bias for optimism—what the economist Al-
bert Hirschman once called “a passion for the possible” (1971, 26). Others
share this hope for a low-carbon future. Indeed, virtually the whole world
already acts in accord with this positive scenario. Few among us are pre-
paring in any practical way for the converse: the runaway rise in sea level
and extreme weather that more hydrocarbons guarantee. Trinis are not
moving from the coast. Illogically perhaps, they refuse to surrender it to
the planetary depredations of their own leading industry. We are all bank-
ing on a rapid economic and political shift to sustainability. Perhaps some
believe carbon capture and storage will solve the problem singlehandedly.
The rest of us consign oil firms to an ash heap, worthy of condescension
and worse. Perhaps this is the most hopeful finding of all: on the plane of
unacknowledged assumptions, governments, firms, and individuals have
already replaced coal, oil, and gas. All the dissident must do now is recog-
nize and assert what so many assume. Any tone in any medium will help.
Humor and wonder and science and art—as well as outrage and rage in the
streets—will move the world to burn far less fossil fuel. Conscience will
replace complicity. Obama has prohibited construction of the Keystone
xl pipeline. Shand has returned to Trinidad and wishes to install wind
turbines on the north coast.
152 Conclusion
NOTE S
Introduction
1 “Le jeune Bastien, pour se reconnaître envers Celiante qui l’a obligé dans divers
services, ne manquera guère de lui offrir la preuve de gratitude qu’un jeune
homme de vingt ans peut offrir à une dame de cinquante” (Fourier 1840, 7).
2 C. F. Stollmeyer, “Satellite,”Morning Star, October 11, 1845, emphasis in original.
3 “The Second Tropical Emigration Society,” Morning Star, October 18, 1845.
4 “Tropical Emigration Society Report of the Directors, Read and Adopted at
the Annual Meeting Held January 4th, 1846,” Morning Star, January 17, 1846.
5 Excerpted in “Review,” Morning Star, May 3, 1845.
6 “Review,” Morning Star, June 7, 1845. Although printed entirely in quotation
marks, this passage appears to have adapted, paraphrased, and expanded upon
Hall (1827, 103–4).
7 “Review,” Morning Star, June 7, 1845. Again, quotation marks indicate that
Duncan attributes this passage to Hall, but Hall’s text contains nothing resem-
bling it.
8 Excerpted in “Review,” Morning Star, July 12, 1845.
9 James Elmslie Duncan, “On Climate, Particularly of Venezuela and the Trop-
ics,” Morning Star, May 31, 1845.
10 From Thomas W. Carr and Charles Taylor to the Directors of the Tropical Em-
igration Society, October 20, 1845; printed in the Morning Star, November 29,
1845.
11 From Thomas Carr to C. F. Stollmeyer, March 4, 1846, printed in the Morning
Star, April 18, 1846.
12 From W. E. Prescod to the Directors of the Tropical Emigration Society,
March 7, 1846, printed in the Morning Star, April 18, 1846.
13 C. F. Stollmeyer to the Secretary of the Tropical Emigration Society, Janu-
ary 20, 1846, printed in the Morning Star, February 28, 1846.
14 Gazette (Port of Spain), May 5, 1846, reprinted in “The Tropical Emigration
Society,” the Morning Star, August 1, 1846.
1 The scientific term for tar sands—also known as oil sands—is bituminous
sands.
2 Lately, however, the exploitation of shale gas in the United States has provoked
a reevaluation.
3 The figures are 2,795 versus 565 gigatons of co2. The former number includes
oil, gas, and coal (McKibben 2012). Bridge and Le Billon (2013, 65–66) give a
figure of 620 gigatons of co2 for proven oil and gas reserves, still higher than
the climate boundary. See McGlade and Elkins (2015) for the most thorough
analysis.
4 Scott (1998) has provoked much debate on bureaucratic, improvement-
oriented, and homogenizing ways of seeing. Ferguson (2005) argues that oil
companies, by contrast, see territory in a way that emphasizes heterogeneity.
I write of oil “producers” so as to distinguish the same actors’ view of under-
ground resources from their models of aboveground risk.
5 Coll (2012, 541) quotes an offended advisor to President Obama on energy
issues.
6 I borrow the terms traverse and columnar from Rudwick (1976, 164).
7 Krishna Persad, conversation with the author, La Romaine, Trinidad, January 5,
2012.
8 Krishna Persad, “Future Hydrocarbon Prospects in Trinidad and Tobago’s Ex-
plored Basins,” presentation to the Energy Conference, Port of Spain, Trinidad
and Tobago, February 6–8, 2012.
9 The Society of Petroleum Evaluation Engineers and the Society of Exploration
Geophysicists also coauthored the document (Society of Petroleum Engineers,
et al. 2011).
10 Larry McHalffey, remarks at the release of the National Gas Reserves Audit,
Port of Spain, July 13, 2010. See Breglia (2013, 62–63) for a similar account from
Mexico.
11 Renuka Singh, “Ten Years Left,” Express, July 14, 2010.
12 David Renwick, conversation with the author, Port of Spain, July 12, 2010.
13 “Energy Chamber to Govt on Falling Gas Reserves: Take Action Now,” Express
(Port of Spain), July 21, 2010.
14 Philip Farfan, remarks at the Understanding Reserves workshop, Energy Con-
ference, Port of Spain, February 8, 2012.
1 “Se hundió una mancha de tierra por donde estaba el camino, y luego en su
lugar remaneció otro estanque de Brea, con espanto y temor de los vecinos,
recelos de que quando menos piensen, suceda lo mismo dentro de sus Pobla-
ciones” (Gumilla [1745] 1945, 47).
2 Arthur Forde, conversation with the author, La Brea, February 11, 2010.
3 Ethelbert Monroe, conversation with the author, La Brea, March 2, 2010.
4 Errol Jones, conversation with the author, Port of Spain, June 10, 2010.
5 Conversation with the author, La Brea, March 7, 2010.I never got his name,
and, if I had, I would be using a pseudonym anyway.
1 “Les deux golfes [Paria and Cariaco, to the west of the peninsula] doivent leur
origine à des affaissemens et à des déchiremens causés par des tremblemens de
terre” (Humboldt and Bonpland 1816, III, 231).
2 “Dans l’état actuel des choses, on voit s’agrandir, en gangnant sur la mer, les
plaines humides” (Humboldt and Bonpland 1816, III, 232).
3 Lincoln Myers, conversation with the author, Gran Couva, Trinidad, July 2,
2011. Cf. Griffith and Oderson (2009, 21–86) and Leggett (2001, 24–27).
4 Leo Heileman, conversation with the author via Skype, July 19, 2011.
5 Heileman, conversation with the author, Gran Couva, January 4, 2013.
6 All quotations are from Angela Cropper, conversation with the author, Port of
Spain, January 7, 2012.
7 Eden Shand, conversation with the author, Newark, Delaware, June 20, 2011.
8 Declaration of Barbados, Part One, Article III, Clause 2.
9 “Draft Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change on Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reduction,” submitted on May 17, 1996,
as Paper No. 1 by Trinidad and Tobago on behalf of aosis for consideration by
the Ad Hoc Group on the Berlin Mandate, fourth session, Geneva, July 9–16,
1996, http://unfccc.int/resource/docs/1996/agbm/misc02.pdf.
10 Surprisingly, in this period, the government invoked none of the available
arguments, such as off-shoring, historical debt, or the distinction between
subsistence and luxury emissions (cf. Agarwal and Narain 1992, 24ff.).
11 “Port of Spain Climate Change Consensus: The Commonwealth Climate
Change Declaration,” Port of Spain, November 28, 2009, Clause 13.
12 Cropper, remarks at the Commonwealth People’s Forum, opening plenary
session, Port of Spain, November 23, 2009.
13 Emily Gaynor Dick-Forde, remarks at the Heath, Safety, Security, and the En-
vironment Conference, Port of Spain, September 29, 2009. The origins of the
quotation are unclear.
14 Dick-Forde, remarks at the Commonwealth People’s Forum, opening plenary
session, Port of Spain, November 23, 2009.
15 Cropper, conversation with the author, Port of Spain, January 7, 2012.
16 Patrick Manning, conversation with the author, San Fernando, June 29, 2010.
17 Government of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, “Draft National Climate
Change Policy for Trinidad and Tobago,” 2010, 7.
18 The government held four meetings in total.
19 Shand, remarks at the National Consultation on Climate Change Policy, Port
of Spain, March 23, 2010.
20 John Agard, remarks at the National Consultation on Climate Change Policy,
Port of Spain, March 23, 2010.
21 Agard, conversation with the author, St. Augustine, Trinidad, January 29, 2010.
Conclusion
166 R ef e r e nce s
Burtynsky, Edward. 2009. Oil. Göttingen, Germany: Steidl.
Butti, Ken, and John Perlin. 1980. A Golden Thread: 2500 Years of Solar Architecture
and Technology. Palo Alto, CA: Cheshire.
Campbell, Jacob. 2014. “The Nature of Hydrocarbons: Industrial Ecology, Resource
Depletion, and Politics of Renewability in Trinidad and Tobago.” PhD diss.,
University of Arizona, Tucson.
Carlyle, Thomas. 1849. “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question.” Fraser’s
Magazine for Town and Country 40:670–79.
Carrera, Gustavo Luis. [1972] 2005. La Novela del Petróleo en Venezuela. Mérida,
Venezuela: Universidad de los Andes.
Carrier, James G. 2010. “Protecting the Environment the Natural Way: Ethical Con-
sumption and Commodity Fetishism.” Antipode 42 (3): 672–89.
Carrington, Selwyn H. H. 2003. “Capitalism and Slavery and Caribbean Historiog-
raphy: An Evaluation.” Journal of African American History 88 (3): 304–12.
Carter, Paul. 1987. The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History.
New York: Knopf.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Enquiry
35:197–222.
Chakravarty, Shoibal, Ananth Chikkatur, Heleen de Coninck, Stephen Pacala,
Robert Socolow, and Massimo Tavoni. 2010. “Sharing Global co2 Emissions
Reductions among One Billion High Emitters.” Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences 106 (29): 11884–88.
Chamoiseau, Patrick. 1992. Texaco. Paris: Gallimard.
Chapman, Chelsea. 2013. “Multinational Resources: Ontologies of Energy and the
Politics of Inevitability in Alaska.” In Cultures of Energy: Power, Practices, Tech-
nologies, ed. Sarah Strauss, Stephanie Rupp, and Thomas Love, 96–109. Walnut
Creek, CA: Left Coast.
Chase, Malcolm. 2011. “Exporting the Owenite Utopia: Thomas Powell and the
Tropical Emigration Society.” In Robert Owen and His Legacy, ed. Noel Thomp-
son and Chris Williams, 198–217. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
Claeys, Gregory. 1986. “John Adophus Etzler, Technological Utopianism, and Brit-
ish Socialism: The Tropical Emigration Society’s Venezuelan Mission and Its
Social Context, 1833–1848.” English Historical Review 101 (399): 351–75.
Claeys, Gregory, and Lyman Tower Sargent. 1999. “Introduction.” In The Utopia
Reader, ed. Gregory Claeys and Lyman Tower Sargent. New York: New York
University Press.
Cliff, Michelle. 1987. No Telephone to Heaven. New York: Dutton.
Climate One. 2011. “Blessed 350: Bill McKibben and Paul Hawken.” September 8.
http: // envirobeat.com / ?p=3604.
Cochrane, Alexander. 1805. “A Report on the Pitch Lake, etc., in the Island of Trini-
dad.” Publication no. 301, Historical Society of Trinidad and Tobago.
Coll, Steven. 2012. Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power. New York:
Penguin.
R ef e r e nce s 167
Collard, R osemary-Claire. 2014. “Putting Animals Back Together, Taking Commod-
ities Apart.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 104 (1): 151–65.
Colony of Trinidad. 1902. Report of the Asphalt Industry Commission. London:
Waterlow and Sons.
Colony of Trinidad. 1903. Report of Proceedings before Their Honors the Commissions
Appointed to Enquire into Matters Concerning the Asphalt Industry at La Brea in
the Island of Trinidad. Port of Spain: Government Printing Office.
Coopersmith, Jennifer. 2010. Energy, the Subtle Concept: The Discovery of Feynman’s
Blocks from Leibniz to Einstein. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Coronil, Fernando. 1997. The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Vene-
zuela. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Crate, Susan A. 2008. “Gone the Bull of Winter? Grappling with the Cultural Im-
plications of and Anthropology’s Role(s) in Global Climate Change.” Current
Anthropology 49 (4): 569–95.
Crone, G. R. 1938. “The Origin of the Name Antillea.” Geographical Journal 91 (3):
260–62.
Cropper, Angela. 1994. “Small Is Vulnerable.” Our Planet 6 (1): 9–12.
Cropper Foundation. 2008. “Mind Your Own Business: How to Keep Track of
Trinidad and Tobago’s Energy Billions.” Port of Spain: Cropper Foundation.
Crosby, Alfred W. 2006. Children of the Sun: A History of Humanity’s Unappeasable
Appetite for Energy. New York: W. W. Norton.
Crutzen, Paul J. 2002. “Geology of Mankind.” Nature 415 ( January 3): 23.
Crutzen, P. J., and E. F. Stoermer. 2000. “The Anthropocene.” igbp Newsletter 41: 12–14.
Cudjoe, Selwyn. 2003. Beyond Boundaries: The Intellectual Tradition of Trinidad and
Tobago in the Nineteenth Century. Wellesley, MA: Calaloux.
Cunningham-Craig, E. H. 1912. Oil-Finding: An Introduction to the Geological Study
of Petroleum. London: Edward Arnold.
Curtin, Philip D. 1990. The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic
History. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Davidov, Veronica. 2012. “Saving Nature or Performing Sovereignty: Ecuador’s
Initiative to ‘Keep Oil in the Ground.’” Anthropology Today 28 (3): 12–15.
Davis, David Brion. 1966. The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press.
Davis, David Brion. 2006. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New
World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Davis, Mike. 2010. “Who Will Build the Ark?” New Left Review 61:29–61.
Debien, G. 1966. “Le marronage aux Antilles française au XVIIIe siècle.” Caribbean
Studies 6 (3): 3–43.
deGannes, Karen. 2013. “Environment, Development, and Citizenship: Narrative
Processes as Environmental Revolution and Political Change in Post-colonial
Trinidad and Tobago.” PhD diss., University of Michigan.
Deloughrey, Elizabeth. 2004. “Island Ecologies and Caribbean Literatures.” Tijd-
schrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 95 (3): 298–310.
168 R ef e r e nce s
de Sousa, Luis. 2008. “What Is a Human Being Worth (in Terms of Energy)?” Oil
Drum: Europe, July 29. http: // www.theoildrum.com / node / 4315.
de Verteuil, Anthony. 1992. Seven Slaves and Slavery: Trinidad, 1777–1838. Port of
Spain: Anthony de Verteuil.
de Verteuil, Anthony. 1994. The Germans in Trinidad. Port of Spain: Litho.
de Verteuil, Anthony. 1996. “Bunsee Partap (and an Account of the Dome Fire,
1928).” Appendix to A History of Trinidad Oil, by George E. Higgins, 394–410.
Port of Spain: Trinidad Express Newspapers.
de Verteuil, Anthony. 2002. Western Isles of Trinidad. Port of Spain: Litho.
de Verteuil, L. A. A. 1848. “Essay on the Cultivation of the Sugar-Cane in Trinidad.”
In Three Essays on the Cultivation of the Sugar-Cane in Trinidad. Port of Spain:
The Standard.
de Verteuil, L. A. A. 1858. Trinidad: Its Geography, Natural Resources, Administration,
Present Condition and Prospects. London: Ward and Lock.
Driver, Thackwray. 1998. “The Theory and Politics of Mountain Rangeland Con-
servation and Pastoral Development in Colonial Lesotho.” PhD diss., Univer-
sity of London.
Driver, Thackwray. 1999. “Anti-erosion Policies in the Mountain Areas of Lesotho:
The South African Connection.” Environment and History 5:1–25.
Driver, Thackwray. 2002. “Watershed Management, Private Property and Squatters
in the Northern Range, Trinidad.” ids Bulletin 33 (1): 84–93.
Dukes, Jeffrey S. 2003. “Burning Buried Sunshine: Human Consumption of An-
cient Solar Energy.” Climatic Change 61: 31–44.
Dundonald, Thomas Cochrane. 1851. Notes on the Mineralogy, Government, and Con-
ditions of the British West India Islands and North-American Maritime Colonies.
London: James Ridgway.
Dunn, Richard S. 1972. Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English
West Indies. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Dunn, Richard S. 2014. A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica
and Virginia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Energy Information Administration. 2014. June 2014: Monthly Energy Review. Wash-
ington, DC: U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Etzler, John. 1833. The Paradise within the Reach of All Men, without Labour, by Pow-
ers of Nature and Machinery. Part 1. Pittsburgh: Etzler and Reinhold.
Etzler, John. 1841. The New World or Mechanical System, to Perform the Labours of
Man and Beast by Inanimate Powers, That Cost Nothing, for Producing and Pre-
paring the Substances of Life. Philadelphia: C. F. Stollmeyer.
Etzler, John. 1844a. “Emigration to the Tropical World for the Melioration of All
Classes of People of All Nations.” Surrey, UK: Concordium.
Etzler, John. 1844b. “Two Visions of J. A. Etzler: A Revelation of Futurity.” Surrey,
UK: Concordium.
Ewalt, Margaret R. 2008. Peripheral Wonders: Nature, Knowledge, and Enlightenment
in the Eighteenth-Century Orinoco. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press.
R ef e r e nce s 169
Fassin, Didier. 2009. The Empire of Trauma: An Enquiry into the Condition of Victim-
hood. Translated by Rachel Gomme. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Ferber, Edna. 1952. Giant. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Ferguson, James. 1990. The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development,” Depoliticization,
and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ferguson, James. 2005. “Seeing Like an Oil Company: Space, Security, and Global
Capital in Neoliberal Africa.” American Anthropologist 107 (3): 377–82.
Finer, Matt, Remi Moncel, and Clinton N. Jenkins. 2010. “Leaving the Oil under the
Amazon: Ecuador’s Yasuní-itt Initiative.” Biotropica 42 (1): 63–66.
Fourier, Charles. 1840. Le nouveau monde industriel et sociétaire, ou les séries pas-
sionées. Vol. 1. Bruxelles.
Fraser, Lionel Mordaunt. 1971. History of Trinidad. Vol. 2. London: Frank Cass.
Garrard, Greg. 2004. Ecocriticism. Abington, UK: Routledge.
Gelber, Elizabeth. 2015. “Black Oil Business: Rogue Pipelines, Hydrocarbon
Dealers, and the ‘Economics’ of Oil Theft.” In Appel, Mason, and Watts, 2015b,
274–90.
Gerbi, Antonello. [1955] 1973. The Dispute of the New World. Translated by Jeremy
Moyle. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Ghosh, Amitav. 1992. “Petrofiction: The Oil Encounter and the Novel.” New Repub-
lic, March 2, 29–34.
Gillis, John R. 2004. Islands of the Mind. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Glacken, Clarence J. 1967. Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in West-
ern Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Goldstein, Daniel M. 2005. “Flexible Justice: Neoliberal Violence and ‘Self-Help’
Security in Bolivia.” Critique of Anthropology 25 (4): 389–411.
Goldstein, Daniel. 2012. Outlawed: Between Security and Rights in a Bolivian Shanty-
town. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Gómez, Nicolás Wey. 2008. The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South.
Cambridge, MA: mit Press.
Gore, Al. 2006. An Inconvenient Truth: A Global Warning [film]. Hollywood, CA:
Paramount Pictures.
Graves, John. 1995. “Introduction” to Oil Notes, by Rick Bass, 2nd ed. Dallas: South-
ern Methodist University Press.
Griffith, Mark D., and Derrick Oderson. 2009. Nuts and Bolts. St. Michael, Barba-
dos: CaribInvest.
Grove, Richard H. 1995. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island
Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Gumilla, Joseph. [1745] 1945. El Orinoco Ilustrado. Edited by Constantino Bayle.
Madrid: M. Aguilar.
Gumilla, Joseph. 1970. P. José Gumilla: Escritos Varios. Edited by José del Rey. Cara-
cas: Academia Nacional de la Historia.
170 R ef e r e nce s
Hager, Thomas. 2008. The Alchemy of Air. New York: Harmony.
Hall, Francis. 1827. Colombia: Its Present State in Respect of Climate, Soil, Productions,
Population, Government, Commerce, Revenue, Manufactures, Arts, Literature,
Manners, Education, and Inducements to Emigration. London: Baldwin, Cra-
dock, and Joy.
Hamilton, Clive. 2013. Earthmasters. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Hayes, Christopher. 2014. “The New Abolitionism.” The Nation, April 29.
Heileman, Leo. 1993. “The Alliance of Small Island States (aosis): A Mechanism
for Coordinated Representation of Small Island States on Issues of Common
Concern.” Ambio 22 (1): 55–56.
Hein, Carola. 2009. “Global Landscapes of Oil.” New Geographies 2:33–42.
Heise, Ursula K. 2008. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Heringman, Noah. 2004. Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.
Hermann, Weston A. 2006. “Quantifying Exergy Resources.” Energy 31:1685–1702.
Hermann, Weston A., and A. J. Simon. 2006. “Global Exergy Flux, Reservoirs, and
Destruction.” Stanford, CA: Global Climate and Energy Project, Stanford Uni-
versity. http: // www.gcep.stanford.edu / pdfs / GCEP_Exergy_Poster_web.pdf.
Higgins, George E. 1996. A History of Trinidad Oil. Port of Spain: Trinidad Express
Newspapers.
Higman, B. W. 2000. “The Sugar Revolution.” Economic History Review 53 (2): 213–36.
Hirschman, Albert. 1971. A Bias for Hope: Essays on Development and Latin America.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Hitchcock, Peter. 2010. “Oil in an American Imaginary.” New Formations 69:81–97.
Hosein, Gabrielle. 2007. “Survival Stories: Challenges Facing Youth in Trinidad and
Tobago.” Race and Class 49 (2): 125–30.
Hubbert, M. King. 1962. “Energy Resources: A Report to the Committee on
Natural Resources.” Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, National
Research Council.
Huber, Matthew. 2012. “Refined Politics: Petroleum Products, Neoliberalism, and
the Ecology of Entrepreneurial Life.” Journal of American Studies 46 (2): 295–312.
Huber, Matthew. 2013. Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital. Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press.
Hughes, David McDermott. 2010. Whiteness in Zimbabwe: Race, Landscape, and the
Problem of Belonging. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Humboldt, Alexandre de, and Aimé Bonpland. 1805. Essai sur la géographie des
plantes. Paris: Levraut, Schoell, et Compagnie.
Humboldt, Alexandre de, and Aimé Bonpland. 1816. Voyage aux Régions Équinoxia-
les du Nouveau Continent Fait en 1799, 1800, 1801, 1802, 1803, et 1804. Vol. 3. Paris:
Librairie Grecque.
Hyne, Norman J. 1995. Nontechnical Guide to Petroleum Geology, Exploration, Drill-
ing, and Production. Tulsa, OK: PennWell.
R ef e r e nce s 171
Illich, Ivan. [1983] 2009. “The Social Construction of Energy.” New Geographies
2:11–23.
Institute of Marine Affairs. 2003. “Environmental Impact Assessment for the Estab-
lishment of an Industrial Estate at Union Estate, La Brea (Phase 2), Southwest-
ern Trinidad.” Chaguaramas, Trinidad and Tobago: Institute of Marine Affairs.
International Energy Agency. 2010. co2 Emissions from Fuel Combustion: Highlights.
Paris: oecd / iea.
Jacobson, Mark Z., and Mark A. Delucchi. 2009. “A Path to Sustainable Energy by
2030.” Scientific American 301 (5): 58–65.
James, C. L. R. 1938. The Black Jacobins. London: Secker and Warburg.
James, C. L. R. [1938] 1989. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San
Domingo Revolution. New York: Vintage.
James, C. L. R. 1963a. Beyond a Boundary. New York: Pantheon.
James, C. L. R. 1963b. The Black Jacobins, 2nd ed. New York: Vintage.
James, C. L. R. 1966. “Rohan Kanhai: A Study in Confidence.” New World Quarterly
3 (1): 13–15.
John, A. Meredith. 1988. The Plantation Slaves of Trinidad, 1783–1816: A Mathemati-
cal and Demographic Enquiry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jørgensen, Dolly. 2014. “Mixing Oil and Water: Naturalizing Offshore Oil Platforms
in American Aquariums.” In Oil Culture, ed. Ross Barrett and Daniel Worden,
267–88. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Joseph, E. L. 1838. History of Trinidad. London: A. K. Newman and Co.
Kapuściński, Ryszard. 1986. Shah of Shahs. New York: Vintage.
Kashi, Ed, and Michael Watts. 2008. Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the
Niger Delta. Brooklyn, NY: PowerHouse.
Kelman, Ilan. 2010. “Hearing Local Voices from Small Island Developing States for
Climate Change.” Local Environment 15 (7): 605–19.
Kempadoo, Oonya. 2001. Tide Running. Boston: Beacon.
Kenny, Julian. 2011. Of Dragons and Doves: Essays of Our Times. Arima, Trinidad and
Tobago: University of Trinidad and Tobago.
Khan, Aisha. 1997. “Rurality and ‘Racial’ Landscapes in Trinidad.” In Knowing Your
Place: Rural Identity and Cultural Hierarchy, ed. Barbara Chinge and Gerald W.
Creed, 39–69. New York: Routledge.
Khan, Aisha. 2001. “Journey to the Center of the Earth: The Caribbean as Master
Symbol.” Cultural Anthropology 16 (3): 271–302.
Kidron, Carol A. 2009. “Toward an Ethnography of Silence: The Lived Presence
of the Past in the Everyday Life of Holocaust Trauma Survivors and Their
Descendants in Israel.” Current Anthropology 50 (1): 5–19.
Klein, Naomi. 2014. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. New York:
Simon and Schuster.
Kolbert, Elizabeth. 2014. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. New York: Holt.
Konrad, John, and Tom Shroder. 2011. Fire on the Horizon: The Untold Story of the
Gulf Oil Disaster. New York: HarperCollins.
172 R ef e r e nce s
Kormann, Carolyn. 2013. “Scenes from a Melting Planet: On the Climate-Change
Novel.” New Yorker, July 3.
Korngold, Ralph. 1944. Citizen Toussaint. Boston: Little, Brown.
Kövecses, Zoltán. 2002. Metaphor: A Practical Introduction. Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press.
Kropotkin, P. N. 1997. “On the History of Science Professor N. A. Koudryavtsev
(1893–1971) and the Development of the Theory of the Origin of Oil and Gas.”
Earth Sciences History 16 (1): 17–20.
Kublalsingh, Wayne. 2009. Ital Revolution. Toronto: Just World.
Kublalsingh, Wayne. 2011. “An Ecological Messiah.” In Of Dragons and Doves: Essays
of Our Times, by Julian Kenny, 308–9. Arima, Trinidad and Tobago: University
of Trinidad and Tobago.
Kublalsingh, Wayne. 2014. “Global Village or Global Empire: Twenty Short Essays.”
Unpublished manuscript.
Kuhn, Thomas S. 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Kunstler, James Howard. 2005. The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Ca-
tastrophes of the Twenty-First Century. New York: Atlantic Monthly.
Labban, Mazen. 2010. “Oil in Parallax: Scarcity, Markets, and the Financialization of
Accumulation.” Geoforum 41:541–52.
Lafargue, Paul. [1880] 1994. Le droit à la paresse. Paris: Éditions Mille et Une Nuit.
Larkin, Brian. 2013. “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure.” Annual Review of
Anthropology 42:327–43.
Latour, Bruno. 1999. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network
Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lazrus, Heather. 2009. “The Governance of Vulnerability: Climate Change and
Agency in Tuvalu, South Pacific.” In Anthropology and Climate Change: From
Encounters to Actions, ed. Susan A. Crate and Mark Nuttall, 240–49. Walnut
Creek, CA: Left Coast.
Lazrus, Heather. 2012. “Sea Change: Island Communities and Climate Change.”
Annual Review of Anthropology 41:285–301.
Leggett, Jeremy. 2001. The Carbon War. New York: Routledge.
LeMenager, Stephanie. 2012. “Fossil, Fuel: Manifesto for the Post-oil Museum.”
Journal of American Studies 46 (2): 375–94.
LeMenager, Stephanie. 2014. Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lewis, Martin W., and Kären E. Wigen. 1997. The Myth of Continents. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Li, Tania Murray. 2000. “Articulating Indigenous Identity in Indonesia: Resource
Politics and the Tribal Slot.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 42 (1):
149–79.
R ef e r e nce s 173
Li, Tania Murray. 2007. The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the
Practice of Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Liverpool, Hollis “Chalkdust.” 2001. Rituals of Power and Rebellion: The Carnival
Tradition in Trinidad and Tobago, 1763–1962. Chicago: Research Associates
School Times.
Lloyd, Chistopher. 1947. Lord Cochrane: Seaman, Radical, Liberator. New York:
Henry Holt.
Logan, Joshua. n.d. The Price of Progress. Unpublished play.
Lovelace, Earl. 1979. The Dragon Can’t Dance. London: Andre Deutsch.
Lovelace, Earl. 1984. Jestina’s Calypso and Other Plays. London: Heinemann.
Lyell, Charles. 1830. Principles of Geology. Vol. 1. London: John Murray.
Maisier, Véronique. 2015. Violence in Caribbean Literature: Stories of Stones and
Blood. Lanham, MD: Lexington.
Mallet, F. 1802. Descriptive Account of the Island of Trinidad. London.
Malm, Andreas, and Alf Hornborg. 2014. “The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of
the Anthropocene Narrative.” Anthropocene Review 1 (1): 62–69.
Mankekar, Purnima. 2004. “Dangerous Desires: Television and Erotics in Late
Twentieth-Century India.” Journal of Asian Studies 63 (2): 403–31.
Mann, Charles C. 2013. “What If We Never Run Out of Oil?” Atlantic, April 24.
Manyena, Siambabala Bernard, Geoff O’Brien, Phil O’Keefe, and Joanne Rose.
2011. “Disaster Resilience: A Bounce Back or Bounce Forward Ability?” Local
Environment 16 (5): 417–24.
Marcone, Jorge. 2013. “Humboldt in the Orinoco and the Environmental Human-
ities.” Hispanic Issues on Line 12:76–91.
Martin, Gaston. 1948. Histoire de l’Esclavage dans les Colonies Françaises. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France.
Martínez, A. R., D. C. Jon, H. Dekker, and Shofner Smith. 1987. “Classification and
Nomenclature Systems for Petroleum and Petroleum Reserves: 1987 Report.”
World Petroleum Congress.
Marx, Karl. 1976. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Translated by Ben
Fowkes. New York: Vintage.
Marx, Leo. 1964. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in
America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Massé, Armand. 1988. The Diaries of Abbé Armand Massé, 1878–1883. Vol. 3. Trans-
lated by M. L. de Verteuil. Port of Spain: M. L. de Verteuil.
Mathews, Andrew. 2014. “Domesticating the Global Carbon Cycle through Italian
Forests.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropologi-
cal Association, Washington, DC, December 3–7.
Mathieson, William Law. 1926. British Slavery and Its Abolition, 1823–1838. London:
Longmans.
Maurer, Bill. 2006. “The Anthropology of Money.” Annual Review of Anthropology
35:15–36.
174 R ef e r e nce s
McGlade, Christophe, and Paul Elkins. 2015. “The Geographical Distribution of Fos-
sil Fuels Unused When Limiting Global Warming to 2˚C.” Nature 517:187–93.
McKelvey, V. E. 1972. “Mineral Resource Estimates and Public Policy.” American
Scientist 60:32–40.
McKibben, Bill. 1989. The End of Nature. New York: Anchor.
McKibben, Bill. 2003. “Worried? Us?” Granta 83:8–12.
McKibben, Bill. 2010. Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. New York:
Times Books.
McKibben, Bill. 2012. “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math.” Rolling Stone,
August 2.
McNeill, J. R. 2000. Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the
Twentieth-Century World. New York: W. W. Norton.
McPhee, John. 1980. Basin and Range. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Meadows, Donella. 1998. “Thomas Jefferson and Donella Meadows, Slave-Owners.”
Donella Meadows Institute, November 12. http: // www.donellameadows
.org / archives / thomas-jefferson-and-donella-meadows-slave-owners / .
Menard, Russell R. 2006. Sweet Negotiations: Sugar, Slavery, and Plantation Agricul-
ture in Early Barbados. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
Mendes, Alfred. 1934. Pitch Lake. London: Duckworth.
Merry, Sally Engel. 2011. “Measuring the World: Indicators, Human Rights, and
Global Governance.” Current Anthropology 52 (supplement 3): 83–95.
Messerly, Oscar. 1902. Some Contributions to the Scientific Study of the Asphaltic
Deposits of the Island of Trinidad and Neighbouring Mainland with General Con-
siderations on the Judicial Questions Connected with the Exploitation of Asphalt in
Trinidad. Trinidad: Oscar Messerly.
Metz, Bert, Ogunlade Loos, and Leo Meyers, eds. 2005. Carbon Dioxide Capture
and Storage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Miller, Daniel. 1994. Modernity, an Ethnographic Approach: Dualism and Mass Con-
sumption in Trinidad. Oxford: Berg.
Miller, Daniel. 2011. Tales from Facebook. London: Polity.
Ministry of Energy and Energy Industries. 2009. The Republic of Trinidad and To-
bago: Celebrating a Century of Commercial Oil Production. London: first.
Mintz, Sidney W. 1985. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History.
New York: Penguin.
Mitchell, Timothy. 2009. “Carbon Democracy.” Economy and Society 38 (3): 399–432.
Mitchell, Timothy. 2011. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. New
York: Verso.
Mollat, Michel. 1965. “Soleil et navigation au temps des découvertes.” In Le Soleil à
la Renaissance: Sciences et Mythes. Brussels: Presses Universitaires de Bruxelles.
Moore, Amelia. 2010. “Climate Changing Small Islands: Considering Social Science
and the Production of Island Vulnerability and Opportunity.” Environment and
Society: Advances in Research 1:116–31.
R ef e r e nce s 175
Moore, Michael, dir. 2004. Fahrenheit 9 / 11 [film]. Lionsgate Films.
Moors, Kent. 2011. The Vega Factor: Oil Volatility and the Next Global Crisis. Hobo-
ken, NJ: Wiley.
Mottley, Wendell. 2008. Trinidad and Tobago: Industrial Policy, 1959–2008. Kingston,
Jamaica: Ian Randle.
Mouhot, Jean-François. 2011. “Past Connections and Present Similarities in Slave
Ownership and Fossil Fuel Usage.” Climate Change 105:329–55.
Mulchansingh, Vernon C. 1971. “The Oil Industry in the Economy of Trinidad.”
Caribbean Studies 11 (1): 73–100.
Mumford, Lewis. 1934. Technics and Civilization. New York: Harcourt, Brace.
Munif, Abdelrahman. 1994. Cities of Salt. Translated by Peter Theroux. New York:
Vintage.
Nader, Laura. 1974. “Up the Anthropologist—Perspectives Gained from Studying
Up.” In Reinventing Anthropology, ed. Dell Hymes, 284–311. New York: Vintage.
Nader, Laura. 2004. “The Harder Path—Shifting Gears.” Anthropological Quarterly
77 (4): 771–91.
Naipaul, V. S. 1962. The Middle Passage. New York: Vintage.
Naipaul, V. S. 1969. The Loss of El Dorado. New York: Knopf.
Naipaul, V. S. 1970. “Power to the Caribbean People.” New York Review of Books 15
(4): 32–34.
Naipaul, V. S. 1988. The Enigma of Arrival. New York: Vintage.
Naipaul, V. S. 1994. A Way in the World. London: Heinemann.
Newell, Jennifer. 2010. Trading Nature: Tahitians, Europeans, and Ecological Ex-
change. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.
Newson, Linda. 1976. Aboriginal and Spanish Colonial Trinidad: A Study in Culture
Contact. London: Academic Press.
Nikiforuk, Andrew. 2012. The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the New Servitude. Vancou-
ver: Greystone.
Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Noel, Jesse. 1972. Trinidad, Provincia de Venezuela: Historia de la Adminstración
Española de Trinidad. Caracas: Academia Nacional de Historia.
Norgaard, Kari. 2006. “‘We Don’t Really Want to Know’: Environmental Justice
and Socially Organized Denial of Global Warming in Norway.” Organization
and Environment 19 (3): 347–70.
Nugent, Dr. 1811. “Account of the Pitch Lake of the Island of Trinidad.” Transactions
of the Geological Society of London 1:63–76.
Nydahl, Joel. 1977. “Introduction.” In The Collected Works of John Adolphus Etzler, by
John Adolphus Etzler, vii–xxxi. Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints.
Nye, David E. 1994. American Technological Sublime. Cambridge, MA: mit Press.
Olien, Roger M., and Diana Davids Olien. 2000. Oil and Ideology: The Cultural
Creation of the American Petroleum Industry. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press.
176 R ef e r e nce s
Orwell, George. 1937. The Road to Wigan Pier. London: Victor Gollancz.
Pantin, Dennis. 2008. “A Sustainable Development Planning Framework for Mega-
projects in Small Places.” Unpublished ms. St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago.
Patterson, Orlando. 1967. The Sociology of Slavery. London: MacGibbon and Kee.
Pérez de Tudela, Juan, Carlos Seco Serrano, Ramón Ezquerra Abadía, and Emilio
López Oto, eds. 1994. Colección Documental del Descubrimiento (1470–1506).
Vol. 3. Madrid: Editorial mapfre.
Perrow, Charles. 1999. Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies. Prince-
ton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Persad, Krishna M. 2011. The Petroleum Geology and Geochemistry of Trinidad and
Tobago. Southern Energy Research Centre.
Persad, Krishna M., and Mia M. Persad. 1993. The Petroleum Encyclopedia of Trini-
dad and Tobago. Krishna Persad.
Polanyi, Karl. 1944. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of
Our Time. Boston: Beacon.
Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. Lon-
don: Routledge.
Price, Richard. 1979. “Introduction: Maroons and Their Communities.” In Maroon
Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, ed. Richard Price, 1–30.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Priest, Tyler. 2007. The Offshore Imperative: Shell Oil’s Search for Petroleum in Post-
war America. College Station: Texas a&m Press.
Quammen, David. 1996. The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of
Extinctions. New York: Scribner.
Rabinow, Paul. 1977. Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Ramos Pérez, Demetrio. 1958. “Un plan de inmigración y libre comercio defendido
por Gumilla para Guayana en 1739.” Anuario de Estudios Americanos 15:201–24.
Rapid Environmental Assessments. 2006. “Environmental Impact Assessment for the
Proposed Establishment of an Aluminium Complex at Main Site North, Union
Industrial Estate, Trinidad.” Port of Spain: Rapid Environmental Assessments.
Renwick, David. 2008a. “The Krishna Persad Vision Machine Grinds On.” Energy
Caribbean 38:20.
Renwick, David. 2008b. “Natural Gas Audit: Reserves Being Replaced on a Yearly
Basis.” Energy Caribbean 39:16.
Renwick, David. 2009. “The Ryder Scott Reserves Audit: What Does It Tell Us?”
Contact (Trinidad and Tobago Chamber of Commerce and Industry) 9 (4): 74.
Ribot, Jesse C. 1995. “The Causal Structure of Vulnerability: Its Application to
Climate Impact Analysis.” GeoJournal 35 (2): 119–22.
Ribot, Jesse C. 2009. “Vulnerability Does Not Just Fall from the Sky: Toward a
Multi-scale Pro-poor Climate Policy.” In Social Dimensions of Climate Change:
Equity and Vulnerability in a Warming World, ed. Robin Mearns and Andrew
Norton, 47–74. Washington, DC: World Bank.
R ef e r e nce s 177
Righter, Robert W. 2002. “Exoskeletal Outer Space Creations.” In Wind Power in
View: Energy Landscapes in a Crowded World, ed. Martin J. Pasqualetti, Paul
Gipe, and Robert W. Righter, 19–41. San Diego: Academic Press.
Rival, Laura. 2010. “Ecuador’s Yasuní-itt Initiative: The Old and New Values of
Petroleum.” Ecological Economics 70:358–65.
Robert, J. Timmons, and Bradley C. Parks. 2007. A Climate of Injustice: Global
Inequality, North-South Politics, and Climate Policy. Cambridge, MA: mit
Press.
Roberts, Justin. 2006. “Working between the Lines: Labor and Agriculture on Two
Barbadian Sugar Plantations, 1796–97.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 63
(3): 551–86.
Roberts, Paul. 2004. The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
Rohlehr, Gordon. 1992. My Strangled City and Other Essays. San Juan, Trinidad and
Tobago: Longman Trinidad.
Ruddiman, William F. 2013. “The Anthropocene.” Annual Review of Earth and
Planetary Sciences 41:45–68.
Rudiak-Gould, Peter. 2011. “Climate Change Mitigation and Self-Blame in the
Marshall Islands.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American
Anthropological Association, Montreal, November 16–20.
Rudwick, Martin J. S. 1976. “The Emergence of a Visual Language for Geological
Science, 1760–1840.” History of Science 14:149–95.
Rudwick, Martin J. S. 2008. Worlds before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in
the Age of Reform. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ruiz, Juan Martínez. 2002. El Lenguaje del Suelo (Toponimia). Jaén, Spain: Universi-
dade de Jaén.
Salgado, Sebastião. 1993. Workers: An Archaeology of the Industrial Age. New York:
Aperture.
Sankeralli, Burton. 2009. The rag File: Writings of the Aluminium Smelter Wars.
Toronto: Just World.
Santayana, George. [1922] 1968. “Marginal Notes on Civilization in the United
States.” In Santayana on America, 188–92. New York: Harcourt, Brace and
World.
Sawyer, Suzana. 2004. Crude Chronicles: Indigenous Politics, Multinational Oil, and
Neoliberalism in Ecuador. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Sawyer, Suzana. 2010. “Human Energy.” Dialectical Anthropology 34:67–75.
Schama, Simon. 1995. Landscape and Memory. New York: Knopf.
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1995. “The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a
Militant Anthropology.” Current Anthropology 36 (3): 409–20.
Scott, Heidi V. 2008. “Colonialism, Landscape, and the Subterranean.” Geography
Compass 2 (6): 1853–69.
Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human
Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
178 R ef e r e nce s
Scott, Lawrence. 2012. Light Falling on Bamboo. Birmingham, UK: Tindal Street.
Sharife, Khadija. 2011. “Colonizing Africa’s Atmospheric Commons.” Capitalism
Nature Socialism 22 (4): 74–92.
Shaxson, Nicholas. 2007. Poisoned Wells: The Dirty Politics of African Oil. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Sheller, Mimi. 2014. Aluminum Dreams: The Making of Light Modernity. Cambridge,
MA: mit Press.
Sheridan, Richard B. 1972. “Africa and the Caribbean in the Atlantic Slave Trade.”
American Historical Review 77 (1): 15–35.
Shiva, Vandana. 1992. “The Greening of Global Reach.” Ecologist 22 (6): 258–59.
Simmons, Matthew R. 2005. Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and
the World Economy. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
Sinclair, Upton. 1917. King Coal: A Novel. New York: Macmillan.
Sinclair, Upton. 1926. Oil! New York: Albert and Charles Boni.
“Sinking without a Trace: Australia’s Climate Change Victims.” 2008. The Indepen-
dent (London), May 5.
Smil, Vaclav. 1994. Energy in World History. Boulder, CO: Westview.
Smil, Vaclav. 2008. Energy in Nature and Society: General Energetics of Complex
Systems. Cambridge, MA: mit Press.
Smil, Vaclav. 2010. Energy Transitions: History, Requirements, Prospects. Santa Bar-
bara, CA: Praeger.
Society of Petroleum Engineers. 2001. “Guidelines for the Evaluation of Petroleum
Reserves and Resources.” Richardson, TX: Society of Petroleum Engineers.
Society of Petroleum Engineers, American Association of Petroleum Geologists,
World Petroleum Council, Society of Petroleum Evaluation Engineers, and
Society of Exploration Geophysicists. 2011. “Guidelines for Application of the
Petroleum Resources Management System.”
Soler, Rosario Sevilla. 1988. Inmigración y Cambio Socio-Economico en Trinidad
(1783–1797). Seville, Spain: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos.
Stafford, Robert A. 1990. “Annexing the Landscapes of the Past: British Imperial
Geology in the Nineteenth Century.” In Imperialism and the Natural World, ed.
John MacKenzie, 67–89. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.
Stoll, Steven. 2008. The Great Delusion: A Mad Inventor, Death in the Tropics, and the
Utopian Origins of Economic Growth. New York: Hill and Wang.
Stollmeyer, Conrad Friedrich. 1839. “Forrede.” In Der Himmel auf Erden oder
Weg zur Glückseligkeit, by Christian Gotthilf Salzmann, v–xii. Philadephia:
C. F. Stollmeyer.
Stollmeyer, Conrad Friedrich. 1845. “The Sugar Question Made Easy.” London:
Effingham Wilson.
Stover, Leon, ed. 1996. The Time Machine: An Invention—a Critical Text of the
1895 London First Edition, with an Introduction and Appendices. Jefferson, NC:
McFarland.
“The Sugar Question.” 1845. London: Smith, Elder, and Co.
R ef e r e nce s 179
Szeman, Imre. 2014. “Conclusion: On Energopolitics.” Anthropological Quarterly 87
(2): 253–64.
Szeman, Imre, and Maria Whiteman. 2012. “Oil Imag(e)naries: Critical Realism and
the Oil Sands.” Imaginations 3 (2): 46–66.
Thompson, Alvin O. 2006. Flight to Freedom: African Runaways and Maroons in the
Americas. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press.
Thongchai Winichakul. 1994. Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation.
Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.
Thorsheim, Peter. 2006. Inventing Pollution: Coal, Smoke, and Culture in Britain since
1800. Athens: Ohio University Press.
Timsar, Rebecca Golden. 2015. “Oil, Masculinity, and Violence: Egbesu Worship in
the Niger Delta of Nigeria.” In Appel, Mason, and Watts, 2015b, 72–88.
Tourism Development Company. n.d. (ca. 2010). “The La Brea Pitch Lake.” Port of
Spain: Tourism Development Corporation.
Trinitrain. 2010. “Rapid Rail Project Information Fact Sheet.” Port of Spain: Trini-
train.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1991. “Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and
Politics of Otherness.” In Recapturing Anthropology, ed. Richard G. Fox, 17–44.
Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.
Tsing, Anna. 2012. “Contaminated Diversity in ‘Slow Disturbance’: Potential Col-
laborators for a Liveable Earth.” In Why Do We Value Diversity? Biocultural Di-
versity in Global Context, ed. Gary Martin, Diana Mincyte, and Ursula Münster,
95–97. Munich: Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society.
Tufte, Edward. 2006. Beautiful Evidence. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press.
unep (United Nations Environment Programme). 2007. Global Environmental
Outlook (geo) 4: Environment and Development. New York: United Nations
Environment Programme.
United Nations Statistics Division. 2009. Energy Statistics Yearbook. New York:
United Nations Statistics Division.
Wahab, Amar. 2010. Colonial Inventions: Landscape, Power, and Representation in
Nineteenth-Century Trinidad. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars.
Wainwright, Joel, and Geoff Mann. 2013. “Climate Leviathan.” Antipode 45 (1): 1–22.
Walcott, Derek. 1992. The Antilles: Fragments of an Epic Memory. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux.
Walcott-Hackshaw, Elizabeth. 2007. Four Taxis Facing North. Hexham, UK: Flam-
bard.
Wall, G. P., and J. G. Sawkins. 1860. Report on the Geology of Trinidad, or Part I of the
West Indian Survey. London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts.
Wall, George P. 1866. “The Origin of Bitumen.” Geological Magazine 3 (23): 236–39.
Watts, Michael. 2001. “Petro-Violence: Community, Extraction, and Political Ecol-
ogy of a Mythic Commodity.” In Violent Environments, ed. Nancy Lee Peluso
and Michael Watts, 189–212. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
180 R ef e r e nce s
Watts, Michael. 2004. “Resource Curse? Governmentality, Oil, and Power in the
Niger Delta, Nigeria.” Geopolitics 9 (1): 50–80.
Weber, Max. [1904–5] 1948. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Trans-
lated by Talcott Parsons. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Weber, Max. [1918] 1946. “Science as a Vocation.” In From Max Weber: Essays in
Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, 129–56. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Wells, H. G. 1895. The Time Machine: An Invention. London: Heinemann.
Wenzel, Jennifer. 2006. “Petro-Magic-Realism: Toward a Political Ecology of Nige-
rian Literature.” Postcolonial Studies 9 (4): 449–64.
Weszkalnys, Gisa. 2011. “Cursed Resources, or Articulations of Economic Theory in
the Gulf of Guinea.” Economy and Society 40 (3): 345–72.
Wildavsky, Aaron, and Ellen Tenenbaum. 1981. The Politics of Mistrust: Estimating
American Oil and Gas Resources. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
Williams, Eric. 1944. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Caro-
lina Press.
Williams, Eric. 1981. Forged from the Love of Liberty: Selected Speeches of Dr. Eric
Williams. Trinidad: Longman Caribbean.
Williams, Raymond. 1973. The Country and the City. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Williamson, Harold F., and Arnold R. Daum. 1959. The American Petroleum Indus-
try: The Age of Illumination, 1859–1899. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press.
Wiltshire, Winston W. 2007. The Commercial Development of Trinidad Lake Asphalt.
Trinidad and Tobago: Winston W. Wiltshire.
Winer, Lise, ed. 2009. Dictionary of the English / Creole of Trinidad and Tobago. Mon-
treal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Wood, Donald. 1968. Trinidad in Transition: The Years after Slavery. London: Ox-
ford University Press.
Yergin, Daniel. 2011. The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern
World. New York: Penguin.
York, Richard. 2012. “Do Alternative Energy Sources Displace Fossil Fuels?” Nature
Climate Change 2:441–43.
Ziser, Michael. 2011. “Oil Spills.” Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 126
(2): 321–23.
Žižek, Slavoj. 2010. Living in End Times. London: Verso.
Zola, Émile. [1885] 1968. Germinal. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion.
R ef e r e nce s 181
This page intentionally left blank
INDEX
184 I NDE X
Cunningham-Craig, Edward Hubert, per Foundation and, 136–37; La Brea,
69, 71f positive view of hydrocarbons in, 96,
115–18; politics of place vs. planet and,
Darwent, Walter, 2, 12, 56 118–19; Rapid Rail project and, 113–16
da Vinci, Leonardo, 11 environmental injustice, 23
Davis, Annabelle, 116 Ethical Oil campaign (Canada), 142
dead metaphors, 10 Etzler, John Adolphus, 44–48, 57, 143
Deepwater Horizon blowout, 141 exergy, 163n8
de Freitas, Douglas, 110 “extraction,” 65
Deonarine, Norris, 114
de Verteuil, Anthony, 157n37 Farfan, Philip, 85–86
de Verteuil, Louis A. A., 57, 124–25, feeling of energy, 18–23
155n24 Ferber, Edna, 10
diamonds, 59, 60f Ferguson, James, 158n4
Dick-Forde, Emily Gaynor, 131–32, 133 “Finding Oil in t&t’s Unexplored
discrimination, 103 Acreage” (Persad), 75, 76f
Dome Fire (1928), 103 fires (2010), 136
“Draft Climate Change Policy for Trini- Fitch (trader), 34–35
dad and Tobago,” 133, 137 Forde, Arthur, 103
The Dragon Can’t Dance (Lovelace), fossil fuels. See hydrocarbons; oil
144 Fourier, Charles, 41, 46, 58–59
Drake, Edwin, 153n1 fuel: as commodity, 39; ethics disem-
Driver, Thackwray “Dax,” 87–88, 91, 145 bedded from energy in, 40; imper-
drought and fires (2010), 136 fect flow of, 31; megasse, 54; slaves as,
Duncan, Francis, 101 30–31, 39–40
Duncan, James Elmslie, 48–49
DuVernay, Alvin, 138 Garcia, Keisha, 136–37
Dyal, Shyam, 136 Gaskin, Molly, 109
gasoline, energy density of, 56f
Ecuador, 135 geoengineering, 87
emissions. See carbon emissions geology and geologists: Barr, Wait, and
The End of Nature (McKibben), 146 Wilson’s “Summarized Miocene
energy: density of, 55, 56f; energy tran- Stratigraphy of Southern Trinidad,”
sition, 13, 30–31, 42; ethics disembed- 70–71, 73f; cliff face, traverse section,
ded from, in “fuel,” 40; term, history and columnar section diagrams, 69–
of, 41; Trinidad mental model of, 71, 70–72f; deep time and verticality,
151. See also hydrocarbons; labor and 68–69, 92; migration and maturation
labor power; somatic power of oil, 73–75, 75f, 76f, 92–93; reserve
Energy Caribbean, 84 replacement, 82; reserves–resources
Energy Chamber, 75, 85–86, 87–88 binary and “proving up” concept,
environmental activism: as “above 76–78; resources and reserves in
ground risk,” 86–87; aluminum charts, 78–82, 79–81f; uniformitarian
smelter debate, 105–8, 111–13; Crop- theory, 68, 69
I NDE X 185
Germinal (Zola), 7–8 An Inconvenient Truth (film), 10
Ghosh, Amitav, 6 inevitability, myth of: carbon capture,
Giant (Ferber), 10 “huff and puff ” operations, and,
Giant (film), 65, 92 86–92; climate boundary limit and,
Gillis, John, 123 66–67; cultural reform and, 147–48;
Global North–Global South binary, deep time and verticality, 68–69,
122, 131 92; energy without conscience and,
global warming. See climate change 90–91; gusher image, 65, 92; inevita-
Gore, Al, 10 bility syndrome, 92–94; migration
Graves, John, 1 and maturation of oil, 73–75, 75f, 76f,
Green Business Forum, 145 92–93; Persad and, 71–75, 88–91;
Gregory, Isaac, 106, 107f reserve replacement, 82; reserves–re-
Guinimita utopian scheme, 41, 48–51 sources binary and “proving up” con-
Gulf of Paria, 124–25 cept, 76–78; resources and reserves
Gumilla, Joseph, 11, 12, 29–30, 38, 39, 59, in charts, 78–82, 79–81f; silence
98–99, 123, 143, 148 of complicity and, 67; supply limit
gusher image, 65, 92 and, 66; terminology of production
and recovery, 65–66; Trinidad, gas
Hakluyt, Richard, 123 reserves audits, and projections in,
Hall, Francis, 49 82–86; vernacular images of vertical-
Healy-Singh, Cathal, 116, 118 ity, 69–71, 70–73f
Heileman, Leo, 128–29 injection of carbon dioxide, 87–92
Hein, Carola, 18 intelligentsia, 120, 138
Hirschman, Albert, 152 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Hitchcock, Peter, 6 Change (ipcc), 67, 87, 134, 142
Homestead Act (1862), 77–78 International Waterfront Centre, 21
Hubbert, M. King, 66 “iron slave,” 44–48, 45f
Huber, Matthew, 18 “islanding,” 123–27
Humboldt, Alexander von, 15, 46–47,
123–24 James, C. L. R., 125–26
Hurricane Katrina, 138 Jaramogi, Akilah, 136
Hussein, Saddam, 7 Joseph, E. L., 124
Hyatt Hotel, Port of Spain, 21 Journey to the Center of the Earth
hydrocarbons: absence of art and liter- (Vernes), 98
ature on, 4–6; circulation of harm
through biosphere, 63, 142; cultural Kalicharan, Ayana, 108
reform and rethinking of, 147–48; Kalicharan, Wendy, 108
near misses, 142–46; quantity of Kangal, Stephan, 114
solar energy compared to, 149; Kapuściński, Ryszard, 10
responsibility shifted to, 16; social Kashi, Ed, 9, 9f
reward, lost potential for, 144–45. See Kavanaugh, J., 54
also specific forms Kempadoo, Oonya, 21
hydrofracking, 66 Kenny, Julian, 119
186 I NDE X
kerosene, 12, 41–43, 53, 55–56, 56f manure, 156n24
Keystone xl pipeline, 146, 152 maroons (runaways), 37–38
King Coal (Sinclair), 8 Marshall Islands, 138
Kolbert, Elizabeth, 143 Marx, Karl, 30, 154n8
Kublalsingh, Wayne, 112–19, 145–46 Marx, Leo, 97
Kumarsingh, Kishan, 133–34, 134f, 136 Mason, Arthur, 5, 153n8
Kyoto Protocol, 130 Mathews, Andrew, 150
maturation of oil, 75, 76f, 92–93
Labban, Mazen, 82 McHalffey, Larry, 83
labor and labor power: kerosene labor McKelvey, Vincent, 78–79
savings rejected by Stollmeyer, McKibben, Bill, 17, 23, 24, 67, 93,
55–60; laziness, 57, 58; The Paradise 146–47, 147f
within Reach of All Men without McPhee, John, 68
Labour (Etzler), 47–48; productivity, megasse, 54
58; rest–work balance and oil, 58–59; Merry, Sally Engel, 132
slaves and, 30–31; Stollmeyer’s Messerly, Oscar, 99–102, 100f
fecundity with toil, 53; Stollmeyer’s metabolism, 40, 45, 154n8
“paradise without labor,” 41–42. See migration of oil, 73–75, 75f, 76f
also somatic power militant anthropology, 4
La Brea: Dome Fire (1928) and decline Miller, Daniel, 20
of, 103; gas-fired power plant, 115–17, Ministry of Energy, 83–84, 89–91, 138
145; as lakeside village, 103; new Mintz, Sidney, 40
highway route near, 146; as oil town Mitchell, Timothy, 82
and pitch town, 103; positive view of Mohammed, Reeza, 110
hydrocarbons in, 96; smelter debate, Monroe, Ethelbert, 104
105–8, 112. See also Pitch Lake Montano, Machel, 153n2
La Brea Concerned Citizens United, Morning Star, 48–50
105, 111, 112, 117 Mouchot, Augustin, 143–44
Lafargue, Paul, 58 Mouhot, Jean-François, 148
Lashley, Selwyn, 90 Mount Airy plantation, Virginia, 154n8
Latour, Bruno, 16 mules, 35–36
Laventille, Port of Spain, 144 Mumford, Lewis, 54
laziness, 57, 58 Munif, Abdelrahman, 10
LeMenager, Stephanie, 10 Myers, Lincoln, 128–30
Lenny Sumadh, Ltd., Automotive, Pe-
troleum, and Industrial Supplies, 108 Naipaul, V. S., 29, 126–27
Li, Tania, 121 Nathan, Nathaniel, 101
Logan, Joshua, 104–5 National Energy Corporation, 110, 115
Lovelace, Earl, 5, 144 National Food Crop Farmers Associa-
Lyell, Charles, 68, 98–99 tion, 114
natural gas: afforestation for, 145;
The Maldives, 137 circulation of, 63; converted into
Manning, Patrick, 111, 116, 131, 133, 135, 137 ammonia and carbon dioxide for
I NDE X 187
natural gas (continued) Packer, Roger, 86
injection, 88; gas audit and reserves, Pantin, Denis, 113, 115
83; Heileman on, 129; orange flare The Paradise within Reach of All Men
of, 111; Persad on, 149; Rights Action without Labour (Etzler), 47–48
Group and, 115; role of, in Trinidad, pastoral: agrarian vs. small, 113; agricul-
103; smelter consumption rate, ture vs. smelting, 114; English rural
161n44 nostalgia vs. Trinidad, 97; La Brea
Neanderthals, 86, 159n15 and, 103, 118; petro-pastoral, 97–98,
negros cimarrones, 38 111, 115
New Orleans, 138 Paul, Tony, 85
Niger delta, 96 peak oil, 66
Nigeria, 9f, 9–10 Percy, Charles, 89–90
Nikiforuk, Andrew, 148 Pereira, Vincent, 91
Nixon, Rob, 6, 14 Perrow, Charles, 110
Norgaard, Kari, 129 Persad, Krishna, 71–75, 74f, 88–94, 135,
Numa Dessources, George, 52 148, 149–50
petroleum, 56, 56f. See also oil
“Occasional Discourse on the Negro Petroleum Encyclopedia of Trinidad and
Question” (Carlyle), 57 Tobago (Persad and Persad), 73
oil: as already cynical category, 60; Dar- Petroleum Geology and Geochemistry of
went’s early well, 56; as environmen- Trinidad and Tobago (Persad), 73
tal injustice and structural violence, Petroleum Resources Management
23; “extraction” vs. “production” of, System (prms), 80–82, 81f
65; finders vs. users of, 142; flatness petromelancholia, 10
of, 43, 60; hidden from view, 6–7; petro-pastoral, 97–98, 111, 115
labor-saving potential, missed, 57– Petrotrin, 89, 106, 109, 136
58; leaving something in the ground Phalanx community, 46, 58
for the future, 135; in literature, 6–9; pitch. See asphalt
money metaphor for, 10; as new slav- Pitch Lake: Agatha Proud as owner of,
ery, 148; as salve, 110; somatic power 103–5; Asphalt Industry Commis-
from vantage of, 51–53; transition to sion and Wall’s surface model vs.
amorality of, 59; work vs. rest and, Messerly’s vertical pushing theory,
58–59. See also asphalt; crude petro- 99–103; Cazabon’s Asphalt Lake,
leum; hydrocarbons; inevitability, 95f, 95–96; historical views of,
myth of; kerosene; petroleum 98–99; Logan’s play The Price of
Oil! (Sinclair), 6, 8 Progress, 104–5; Messerly’s “chim-
“Oil in the Coil” (Scrunter), 5 neys,” 99–101, 100f; Stollmeyer
oil sands (tar sands), 66, 146, 158n1 and, 51–53, 58; Wall and Sawkins’s
Orinoco River and delta, 11, 13, 99, traverse section of, 69, 70f, 99, 100f;
123–25 water pollution at, 105–6. See also
“Orinoquia” region, 123 La Brea
Orwell, George, 15 plantation slavery. See slavery
Owen, Robert, 46 Pointe-a-Pierre Wildfowl Trust, 109
188 I NDE X
Point Lisas Industrial Estate, 88, 109–10, reserves: “proving up,” 77–78; replace-
126 ment of, 82; resources vs., 77–82,
Polanyi, Karl, 39 79–81f; sec redefinition of, 85; in
Pont Fortin, 111 Trinidad, 81–86
Port of Spain, Trinidad: Cascade neigh- resources, oil: proved reserves vs.,
borhood, 18–19; Commonwealth 77–82, 79–81f; in Trinidad, 81–86
Heads of Government Meeting Righter, Robert, 150
(2009), 130–31; International Wa- Rights Action Group, 112, 114–16, 117
terfront Centre, 21; Laventille, 144; The Right to Laziness (Lafargue), 58
Newtown neighborhood, 20–21; Rio Summit (1992), 128, 130
Queens Park Savannah, 20; three robots, solar, 44–48
energy zones of, 18–21 Rogers, Alfred, 101
Port of Spain Climate Change Consen- Roume de St. Laurent, Philippe Rose,
sus, 131 31–32, 34, 38, 154n8
Powell, Thomas, 48–49 Roy, Herbert, 37
Pratt, Mary Louise, 15 Rudder, David, 153n2
Premdas, Noah, 105–6 Rudder, Winston, 136–37
Prescod, W. E., 50 Rudwick, Martin J. S., 69, 81–82
The Price of Progress (Logan), 104–5
Priest, Tyler, 93 Saint-Méry, Moreau de, 32
production of oil. See inevitability, Sakha herders, Siberia, 132
myth of Salgado, Sebastião, 7, 7f
Protheroe, Arthur, 101 San Fernando, 108
Proud, Agatha, 103–5 Sankeralli, Burton, 111–12, 117, 118
proved reserves. See reserves Santayana, George, 42
public consultations on climate change “Satellite” (machine), 44–45, 45f, 48, 51
policy, 133–36 Sawkins, Jas, 69, 70f, 99, 100f
scale, 114–15, 126–27
racial landscape of South Trinidad, 111 scarcity, production of, 76–77
rail project, 113–16, 161n44 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, 4
Rajav, Shiraz, 89 Scott, James, 39, 158n4
Raleigh, Walter, 53, 123 Scott, Ryder, 83, 85–86
Rapid Rail project, 113–16, 161n44 secondary recovery, 65
“recovery,” 65 Securities and Exchange Commission,
renewable energy: aosis and dismissal U.S. (sec), 85
of, 129; hydrocarbons as, 66; oil Seepersad-Bachan, Carolyn, 83–84
finders vs. users and, 142; practicality Shand, Eden, 18, 20, 130, 134, 146–47,
argument, 84–85; solar, 11, 44–48, 147f, 151, 152
129, 143–44, 149–50; as supplemen- Sharife, Khadija, 153n10
tal, 91, 145–46; sustainability first Sheller, Mimi, 149
scenario and, 135; wind, 45, 142, 145, Shiva, Vandana, 63
150, 152 Siberia, 132
Renwick, David, 84 silences, 62, 67
I NDE X 189
Sinclair, Upton, 6, 8, 78 and, 54–55; Guinimita initiative and,
Singh, Joth, 145 41, 48–51; idealism of, 145; “iron
slavery: as analogy for oil, 148; slave” and solar machine utopianism
Bou’Kongo settlement discovery, with Etzler, 44–48, 45f; Kavanaugh
111–12; breeding of slaves, 154n8; Brit- scandal, 54; labor savings of kerosene
ish abolition of, 42; cédula of 1783 and rejected by, 55–60; on laziness of
Cachón’s appointment, 30; Chacón’s free blacks, 42, 53–54, 57–58; missed
efforts to import slaves, 34–35; opportunities and, 143–45; oil flat
Chacón’s quantitative, scientific fuel and, 43; paradise without labor
approach to, 32–34; Code Noir, 37; ideal, 41–42; rapid extraction and,
deaths, 36; energy forms and, 11–12; 99; stands named after, 149; “The
as expendable, consumable fuel, 12; Sugar Question Made Easy,” 44;
fuel, slaves as, 30–31, 39–40; ma- Trinidadian editorship, 52–53, 54;
roons (runaways), 37–38; number of on tropical fecundity, 47, 53; utopian
slaves in Trinidad, 33f; petroleum as colony plan, energy and, 12–13
substitute for, 42–43; slaves as people Stollmeyer, Johnny, 145
and disruption of commodity, 38–39; “stranded” hydrocarbons, 66, 148
Stollmeyer’s “iron slave” and Etzler’s structural violence of oil, 23
“Satellite,” 44–48, 45f, 51; Trinidad as sugar plantations: Caribbean sugar
scavenger in slave trade, 31–32 revolution, 29; Chacón governorship
Small Island Developing States, 130 and, 30; collapse of sugar trade, 43;
“Small Is Vulnerable” (Cropper), 130 energy forms and, 11–12; exhausted
smelter debate, 105–8, 111–13, 119, 145 soils and fertilizers, 155n24; human
Smil, Vaclav, 143 labor vs. kerosene in sugar factories,
solar energy, 11, 44–48, 129, 143–44, 55–60; land clearing for, 35; megasse
149–50 as fuel, 54; as metabolic system, 40;
somatic power: Carnival and, 20; mules and, 35–36; polyculture and,
Chacón’s quantification of, 32–34, 33. See also slavery
36; crisis of, 29, 43; energy transition “the sugar question,” 43–44
and, 42, 59; energy zone of, in Port “The Sugar Question Made Easy”
of Spain, 20; Guinimita and, 51; (Stollmeyer), 44
invalidated by slavery, 144; mules, “Summarized Miocene Stratigraphy of
35–36; reconsidered from vantage Southern Trinidad” (Barr, Wait, and
of oil, 51–57. See also labor and labor Wilson), 70–71, 73f
power; slavery supply, 66. See also resources, oil
South Trinidad Chamber of Industry sustainability first scenario, 135
and Commerce, 159n18 Swistun, Débora, 118
Stoermer, E. F., 153n11 Szeman, Imre, 150
Stollmeyer, Conrad: agriculture
position sought by, 52; asphalt, tar sands, 66, 146, 158n1
kerosene, and Trinidad Petroleum Taylor, Charles, 49
Company, 41–43, 51–52, 55–56; Texaco (Chamoiseau), 118
background, 41, 44; energy density 350.org, 147
190 I NDE X
time, 68–69, 71, 92 verticality, 68–76
The Time Machine (Wells), 8 vertical pushing, theory of, 100–101
Tobago, carbon-neutral goal for, 134–35 victim slot of climate change: aosis
Torres Straits, Australia, 121 and international diplomacy, 127–31;
traps, terminology of, 65–66 climate intelligentsia and, 120;
traverse (cross) section diagrams, Commonwealth People’s Forum
69–71, 70f, 72f and, 131–32; defined, 121–22; Global
Trinidad: absence of art and litera- North–Global South binary and, 122,
ture on hydrocarbons in, 4–5; as 131; heavy industry as right and, 126;
birthplace of petroleum, 2; Chacón innocence vs. guilt and, 121–22, 123,
appointed as governor of, 30; critical 130, 137–38; islanding and geograph-
tradition in, 22; drought and fires ical themes, 123–27; victimhood
(2010), 136; energy alternatives, as category, 121; vulnerability and
history of, 11–12; English takeover public policy, 132–37
of, 30; map, 3f; missed moments and vulnerability, 132–37
movements, 142–46; settlement of,
33f; smallpox (1739) and near ruin of Wait, S. T., 71, 73f
colony, 29. See also specific topics, such Walcott, Derek, 126–27
as slavery or climate change Wall, George, 69, 70f, 99, 100f, 101
Trinidadian newspaper, 52–53, 54, 55 Wallace, Alfred Russell, 124
Trinidad Lake Asphalt, 104, 106–8 water pollution, 105–6, 110–11, 160n10
Trinidad Petroleum Company, 52, 55–56 Watts, Michael, 5, 9, 153n8
Tropical Immigration Society, 48–51 “well abandonment,” 89
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 121 Wells, H. G.: The Time Machine, 8
Tsing, Anna, 17 Weyburn Field carbon capture project,
Tufte, Edward, 80 Saskatchewan, 91
Williams, Eric, 22, 97–98, 113, 126, 130
ultradeep drilling, 66 Williams, Raymond, 103
un Conference on the Environment Wilson, Anderson, 114
and Development (Rio Summit, Wilson, C. C., 71, 73f
1992), 128, 130 wind power, 45, 142, 145, 150, 152
unconformities, 71, 74 wood, 56f
uniformitarian theory, 68, 69 Wood, Andrew, 76
utopianism: Fourier’s Phalanx, 46, 58; Worden, Daniel, 5
Guinimita, 41, 48–51; new subjects Wordsworth, William, 97, 103
in, 150; Stollmeyer’s “iron slave,” World Petroleum Conference, 78–79,
44–48, 45f 80f, 82
I NDE X 191
This page intentionally left blank
This page intentionally left blank
This page intentionally left blank
This page intentionally left blank
This page intentionally left blank
This page intentionally left blank
This page intentionally left blank